Founder + Publisher
Jeff Allen
Jeffery Renard Allen is the award-winning author of five books, most recently the novel Song of the Shank, winner of The Firecracker Award, and finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and a Dublin Literary Prize nominee. Allen has received numerous accolades for his work, including The Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Fiction, The Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, a grant in Innovative Literature from Creative Capital, a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, a residency at the Bellagio Center, and fellowships at The Center for Scholars and Writers, the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Schomburg Center for Black Research and Culture. He has published widely in numerous periodicals and anthologies, and he has lectured worldwide and taught workshops for Summer Literary Seminars, Kwani?, Farafina Writers’ Workshop, Kimbilio, Sewanee, and Disquiet International, among others. His collection of stories Fat Time will be published in 2022. Founder and editor of the online magazine Taint Taint Taint, he is at work on several projects and books, including the critical study The Rhythm of the Hot Dog: Music as Narrative and the memoir Mother Wit. He makes his home in Johannesburg. Find out more about him at www.authorjefferyrenardallen.com
Managing Editor
Josephine Ishmon
Josephine Ishmon is a writer and educator dedicated to honoring the arts and literature of marginalized people. Her writing has garnered fellowships from New School University, Norman Mailer Writers Colony and the Mellon Foundation. She has a B.A. from Hunter College and an MFA in Fiction from New School University. She is working on two novels, one that explores the vulnerability and resiliency of a homeless mother and the other on the duality of being both Black and Asian. “I’m inspired by writing that shows the visceral truth and complexity of who we are, not who the dominant society says we are. I want to see it all—the beauty, the pain, the unchartered.”
Follow Josephine: Instagram
Editor
Reggie Scott Young
Reggie Scott Young, a native of Chicago’s West Side, is a scholar and writer who most recently served as professor on the English faculty at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He is author of the poetry volume Yardbirds Squawking at the Moon, and his works of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in Fifth Wednesday Journal, Louisiana Literature, Oxford American, and African American Review. He served as guest-editor of the Obsidian Literary Journal special issue on Jeffery Renard Allen, and co-edited Mozart and Leadbelly: Stories and Essays by Ernest J. Gaines. He currently lives in San Antonio.
Editor
Trevor Payne
Trevor Payne is a writer and has been an educator for the Ladue and Radnor public schools for 25 years. He received his BA degree in English from Stanford University and MFA degree in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University. Trevor was awarded the Provost Scholarship from Fairleigh Dickinson for the writing in his first novel - A Cup of Water. He has also served as a book reviewer for the Literary Review and is currently at work on a second novel. Trevor likes his fiction realist with a touch of meta, a measure of magic, and he likes his non-fiction with notes of triumph and sad, a burst of gonzo in the voice.
Editor
Jacqueline Johnson
Jacqueline Johnson is a multi-disciplined artist creating in both poetry, fiction writing and fiber arts. Recent exhibitions include: Yours for Race and Country: Reflections on the Life of Colonel Charles Young at the National Afro-American Museum. She is the author of A Woman's Season, on Main Street Rag Press and A Gathering of Mother Tongues, published by White Pine Press and is the winner of the Third Annual White Pine Press Poetry Award.
Creative Director
Najah Stefany Bint Abdush-Shahid Webb
Najah Webb is a freelance bookprenuer who offers her advice, direction, and focus to aspiring and established BIPOC book workers. She owns a company called Bad Book Biddies LLC, an Atlanta-based company, where she offers freelance sensitivity readings, editing, ghostwriting, branding, and content management services for publishers and PR firms such as Catapult Co., MacMillian, and Riverchild Media LLC. Prior to freelancing full-time, she worked as a book scout-in-training for Liz Gately Agency in New York. She is also the founder of the BIPOC Book Critics Collective and co-host of COMPS Book Podcast. She is the proud mother of a beautiful, melanated baby and a part-time poet.
Advisory Editors
Ntone Edjabe
Kim Coleman Foote
Mikhail Lossel
John Keene
Ed Pavlic
Rone Shavers
Terese Svoboda
Special Thanks to Elijah Allen, Yvette Boot, David Daniel, Khary Dickerson, Jason Harris, Tyehimba Jess, John F. Loehr,