Auesta Safi was born in Reston, VA in 1989. She went to high school in Loudoun County, graduated with her bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia, and received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Wyoming. Her poems have appeared in The Colorado Review and The Chattahoochee Review, and she was editor of the 2015 issue of The Owen Wister Review. She currently works as a technical writer in Fairfax, VA. On the weekends, she frequents Mom’s Apple Pie in Leesburg and the H Mart on Gallows Road. When she can, she aimlessly drives through the Blue Ridge towards Monongahela National Forest.
Ah-reum Han was born in South Korea, and raised in The Gambia and Senegal, where she applied herself climbing trees and reading Enid Blyton. She came to America to get her BA, and ended up with a husband and an MFA from George Mason University, where she became fiction editor of Phoebe and fiction fellow. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Okey-Panky, StoryQuarterly (fiction contest winner), Blunderbuss (Best of 2015), Fugue (prose contest runner-up), River Teeth, Fiction International, and Flyway (Notes from the Field contest winner), among others. Her work has also received Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train and was a finalist for the fiction contest at Indiana Review. She lives and loves and writes in Virginia, where she loiters between inspiration and inertia.
Andres Dietz-Chavez, a recipient of an MFA in Fiction from the New School, spent the first semester of graduate school pretending to be a beatnik writer before becoming an assistant editor at a publishing company and promptly becoming jaded. While he no longer believes in the writer as the cultural messiah, he still believes in writing’s power to free the individual. Andres enjoys writing that is irrelevant, irreverent, and sardonic, which generally is his approach to life. Unlike his good colleagues, his work is merely forthcoming.
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