Donyae Coles

Donyae Coles is an artist and a writer whose work is speculative in nature. Her writing is lyrical and haunting and focuses on blending real life anxieties and issues with genre elements found in science fiction, fantasy, and horror. She is represented by Lane Heymont of Tobias Literary for written works.

Deepa Rajagopalan

Deepa Rajagopalan is the author of the short story collection, Peacocks of Instagram, shortlisted for the 2024 Giller prize. She won the 2021 PEN Canada New Voices Award for the title story of the collection. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph.

Ruben Reyes, Jr.

He is a graduate of Harvard College where he studied History and Literature and Latinx Studies. His writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, AGNI, BOMB Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, LitHub, and other publications.

His debut story collection, There is a Rio Grande in Heaven, was a finalist for The Story Prize, and longlisted for the the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the New American Voices Award. Archive of Unknown Universes is his first novel. Originally from Southern California, he lives in Queens.

Lynn Schmeidler

Lynn Schmeidler’s collection of short stories, Half-Lives won the Autumn House Rising Writers Prize. Her fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Georgia Review, KR Online, the Southern Review, and other publications, and she won the 2023 BOMB Fiction Contest for her short story "InventEd." She has been awarded residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She is the author of the poetry book History of Gone and two poetry chapbooks, Wrack Lines and Curiouser & Curiouser. She lives in the Hudson Valley. Follow her on Facebook and Instagram.

Marguerite Sheffer

Marguerite (Maggie) Sheffer is a writer who lives in New Orleans. She is a Professor of Practice at Tulane University, where she teaches courses in design thinking and speculative fiction as tools for social change. Formerly, she taught English at the East Oakland School of the Arts, Castlemont High School, Life Academy, and GW Carver High School.

Her debut short story collection, The Man in the Banana Trees, was selected by judge Jamil Jan Kochai for the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and was published in 2024.

Maggie is a founding member of Third Lantern Lit, a local writing collective, and the Nautilus and Wildcat Writing Groups. She received her MFA from Randolph College. She was a 2023 Veasna So Scholar in Fiction at The Adroit Journal, and was selected as a top-twenty-five finalist for Glimmer Train's Short Story Award for New Writers. Her story “Tiger on My Roof” was a finalist for the 2024 Chautauqua Janus Prize, which awards emerging writers’ short fiction with “daring formal and aesthetic innovations that upset and reorder readers’ imaginations.”

Jeff Somers

Jeff Somers began writing by court order as an attempt to steer his creative impulses away from engineering genetic grotesqueries. He has published nine novels (including the Avery Cates cyberpunk series and The Ustari Cycle urban fantasy series) and over fifty short stories, including “Ringing the Changes,” which was selected for inclusion in Best American Mystery Stories 2006 and “The Little Birds,” published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in 2023. He writes about books for BookBub, the craft of writing for Writer’s Digest (which published his book Writing Without Rules), and everything else for Lifehacker. His  tenth novel Five Funerals will be published by Ruadán Books in Fall, 2025. He lives in Hoboken with his wife, The Duchess, and their cats. He considers pants to always be optional.

Sally Wen Mao

Sally Wen Mao is the author of the poetry collection The Kingdom of Surfaces (Graywolf Press, August 2023), a finalist for the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Prize. Her debut fiction collection, Ninetails, was released from Penguin Books in May 2024. She is the author of two previous poetry collections, Oculus (Graywolf Press, 2019), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2013 and 2021, The Paris Review, Granta, Poetry, A Public Space, Harpers Bazaar, The Washington Post, and others. The recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she was recently a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library and a Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute. She has taught writing at NYU, Cornell, and Sarah Lawrence College, and will be an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Baruch College in 2024.

Jessica Berg

Rosecliff Literary

Jessica Berg is a literary agent, author, and the founder of Rosecliff Literary, where she champions bold, emotionally resonant fiction with unforgettable characters, strong stakes, and a sense of urgency.

She is especially drawn to literary, upmarket, historical, and supernatural suspense, with a soft spot for haunting atmosphere, richly layered relationships, and characters who carry deep emotional wounds. Give her a protagonist standing at the edge of reinvention, a world on the brink of change, or a past that refuses to stay buried. She loves stories that explore grief, longing, ambition, and survival and the complicated ways they intersect. If your book feels like it belongs in a candlelit room with a storm raging outside, she wants to see it.

A multi-nominated writer with an MFA from Spalding University, Jessica brings a sharp editorial eye and a hands-on, strategic approach to agenting. She is a member of AALA and EFA and provides developmental feedback for Writer’s Digest. Represented by Amy Collins at Talcott Notch, she splits her time between crafting her own stories and guiding her clients through every stage of their publishing careers.

Her mission? To champion distinctive voices, build lasting careers, and bring books into the world that demand to be remembered.

Jessica is an editor for Writer's Digest's 2nd Draft Critique and Editing Services.

Jess Dallow

Jess Dallow has a BFA in Writing for Film and Television from the University of the Arts and worked in entertainment for eight years before returning to her home state of NY where she worked in the publishing industry for a decade. Jess specialized in YA, adult. contemporary, thriller, romance, crime, & women's fiction.

Jess is an editor for Writer's Digest's 2nd Draft Critique and Editing Services.

Nikoletta Gjoni

Nikoletta Gjoni is a writer, editor, and writing coach who loves to work with writers both new and experienced. Her stories have appeared in multiple anthologies and have been previously nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau short story prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. Originally from Albania, she especially loves stories that grapple with immigration, identity, family dynamics, and folklore and mythology. As an editor and coach, Nikoletta loves to perform developmental and line edits to really help manuscripts shine. She specializes in literary fiction, historical fiction, creative nonfiction or memoir, and YA. She loves all things creepy, mythical, historical, and honest.

Niki is an editor for Writer's Digest's 2nd Draft Critique and Editing Services.