Michael J. Sanders, Fiction Editor
Michael J. Sanders, if that is his real name, is a writer, artist, and educator. He has published fiction, multimedia writing, poetry, and criticism under various Kierkegaardian heteronyms.
Sara Brenes Akerman, Fiction Editor
Sara Brenes Akerman is a writer, an amateur historian of lunch, and an aspiring Frank Sinatra impersonator. She holds an MFA in fiction from NYU and is currently an English PhD student at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is trying to finally finish that dissertation. She once published a story about being in love with historian Robert Caro in The Brooklyn Review.
Sophie He, Nonfiction Editor
Sophie He is a writer from Los Angeles. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in No Tokens, Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM, Catapult, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where she also taught creative nonfiction. She is a copywriter by day.
Margaret Grayson, Nonfiction Assistant Editor
Margaret Grayson is an essayist and journalist from southwest Colorado. She graduated from the University of Montana School of Journalism and is an MFA candidate at Washington University in St. Louis. She’s the 2022 winner of The Montana Quarterly‘s Big Snowy Prize for Nonfiction.
Tolu Daniel Ojuola, Nonfiction Assistant Editor
Tolu Daniel is a Nigerian writer and editor. He is the curator of Ellipsis, a newsletter featuring diasporic voices on culture, migration, displacement, and literature via personal essays and interviews. His essays have appeared in Catapult, Lolwe, Olongo Africa, Barren Magazine, Panorama Journal and elsewhere.
S. Yarberry, Poetry Editor
S. Yarberry is a trans poet and writer. Their poetry has appeared in AGNI, Tin House, Indiana Review, Redivider, jubilat, Notre Dame Review, The Boiler, among others. Their other writings can be found in Annulet: A Journal of Poetics, Bomb Magazine, The Adroit Journal, and Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly. S. has their MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis and is now a PhD candidate in Poetry & Poetics at Northwestern University. Their first book, A Boy in the City, was published by Deep Vellum in 2022.
Temperance Aghamohammadi, Poetry Reader
Temperance Aghamohammadi is an Iranian-American poet, occultist, and anthropologist from Connecticut. Their work appears in Meridian, The Missouri Review, Bear Review, and elsewhere. Temperance is currently an MFA candidate at Washington University in St. Louis.
David Ehmcke, Poetry Reader
David Ehmcke is an MFA candidate in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis. He was selected by Diane Seuss as the runner-up for the 2022 Black Warrior Review Poetry Prize, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, The Adroit Journal, Peripheries, Hobart, Cosmonauts Avenue, Deluge, The Columbia Review, and elsewhere.
Asha Futterman, Poetry Reader
Asha Futterman is a writer and actor from Chicago. She is a current MFA candidate at Washington University in St. Louis.
Carlota Gamboa, Poetry Reader
Carlota Gamboa is a poet from Los Angeles. She is a current MFA candidate at Washington University in St. Louis.
Jae Kim, Translation Editor
Jae Kim is a writer and translator whose work appears in Conjunctions, NOON, Poetry, and Granta. His translations have received support from the National Endowment for the Arts and Literature Translation Institute of Korea. His book Cold Candies: Selected Poems of Lee Young-ju (Black Ocean, 2021) is the winner of 2022 Lucien Stryk Prize.
Jordan Keller-Martinez, Operations Editor
Jordan Keller-Martinez held the Junior Fellowship in Poetry at Washington University in St. Louis, where he received his MFA. His poems have appeared in POETRY, The Adroit Journal, Colorado Review, Guesthouse, and elsewhere.
Abbey Frederick, Art Editor
Abbey Frederick is a poet from upstate New York. She is the design editor for Seneca Review and a current MFA student at Washington University in St. Louis. Her writing appears in DIAGRAM, Interim, Art Journal, and elsewhere.
Dalanie Beach, Contributing Artist
Dalanie Beach is a nonbinary creative writer and visual artist whose work circles themes of identity, transformation, and personhood. Their work has appeared in East Fork and OxMag and is forthcoming in Glassworks and Drunk Monkeys.
Owen Brown, Contributing Artist
Owen Brown was born in Chicago, trained as a classical musician, took his first art class at 23, and much of what he’s wanted to do since then has been paint. Brown holds degrees from Yale College and the University of Chicago, and was a degree student at California College of the Arts. He lived for over 30 years in San Francisco, where he was represented by Meridian Gallery. He now lives in Minneapolis. Brown has exhibited in juried shows and solo exhibits throughout the United States, Europe and Canada. His works have been acquired by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Nature Conservancy, the Minnesota Historical Society, the University of Chicago and the Weisman Museum of Minneapolis, and can be found in collections in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Brown has had residencies at Air Le Parc in France, and at the Land Institute in Kansas, where he created his first installation: “Units of Measure.” He is represented nationally by Holly Hunt and Gallery 13, he shows regionally at Veronique Wantz and Grand Hand, and he has collaborated with artists of other disciplines, such as Emily Wolahan and Jason Lord.
Paz Mallea, Contributing Artist
Paz Mallea is a Chilean-born American artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her practice includes painting, illustration, and animation. This year she co-founded the animation studio Pilmawilla, completing music videos for Fire-Toolz, Silver Liz, and Lipsticism, among others. She is the co-organizer of Watercolour Society, a monthly freeform painting meetup in Brooklyn. Recently, she has shown work at Piano Craft Gallery, Wall Frame Affairs, and Deanna Evans Projects Flat File. She was invited to the DNA Artist Residence Program in Provincetown, MA, in 2018, 2019, and 2020. In 2018, she participated in a residency at Utopia126 in Barcelona. She received her BFA from Pratt Institute in 2009.
Stephen Lee Naish, Contributing Artist
Stephen Lee Naish is a UK-born writer and visual artist. His writing has appeared in Aquarium Drunkard, Film International, The Quietus, Sublation Magazine, Dirty Movies, The Big Picture, 25 Years Later, Albumism, and Merion West. His artistic works have appeared in Empty Mirror, Apricity Magazine, Lost Futures, and The Creative Zine. He is the author of six books of nonfiction. He lives in Kingston, Ontario.
Kier Cooke Sandvik, Contributing Artist
Kier Cooke Sandvik (b.1987, Stavanger) is a Norwegian artist with an MFA from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. His work deals with the body/bodily and sexuality, taking an emotional and instinctual approach to the creation process, as well as with the expression of the subject of psychological trauma, which is often considered fundamentally unrepresentable.
Katie Voyt, Contributing Artist
Katie Voyt (b. 1984 in Moscow, Russia) is an emerging mixed media abstract artist based in Cape Cod, MA. Katie has always been drawing and painting. At school, she would draw on the last pages of her notepads. Her years at youth architecture school and working as an interior decorator had a great impact on her further growth as an artist. Having lived abroad for the past 10 years and having to leave Russia when the war started also greatly impacted Katie’s life. She found a new home in Cape Cod, MA, and began her creative journey in the local artistic community. The move served as a strong motivator to pursue her art career—the beauty of the landscape and the sea on the Cape made her express herself through colors and shapes. In her paintings she researches nature and relationships using organic shapes and a variety of textures and materials (acrylics, oil pastels, graphite and markers on canvas). Katie is moving away from the rectangular shape of the traditional painting and its historical reference to a window, in which the viewer looks outside into the world. She wants the viewer to be centered on what is important to them and to look inside themselves.
Paul Kramer Waters, Contributing Artist
Paul is creating art full time after practicing architecture for decades and only making art in his free time. While an architect, Paul’s role included integrated-art-in-architecture projects using etched glass, photo-based glass art, and mosaic tile. Paul works in a variety of media including found object assemblage, screen-printing, digital printmaking, public art installations, mixed media collage, and mosaic. Paul’s current artistic endeavors include a return to found object assemblage in order to make a dent in the thousands of objects collected from the streets and sidewalks of Portland stored in his basement. This assemblage work has (temporarily) put a pause to his ‘sketch collages’ which are quick (about an hour) collages with various sets of self-imposed rules, such as using only tourist literature from Barcelona, using only circles, not using any representational imagery, and even adding small found objects fastened to the paper. Paul lives in Portland, Oregon, with his artist wife Kathryn. Paul and Kathryn remodeled their home recently to create a collaborative artist’s room-share, providing rooms and studio space for three artists.
Editorial Interns
Jada Dorsey
Jack Grimes
Preston Hutchens
Eliana Jenkins
Francisco Lucca
Ava Morgan
Sara Rizzoli
Caroline Sarris
Matthew Shepetin
Lexi Suarez
Gracie Zhang
Senior Managing Editor, Faculty Advisor
Heather McPherson
Advisory Board
Rhiannon Amato
David Schuman
Abram Van Engen
Cass Donish, Editor Emeritus
Cass Donish is the author of the poetry collections The Year of the Femme (University of Iowa Press, 2019), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, and Beautyberry (Slope Editions, 2018). Their nonfiction chapbook On the Mezzanine (2019) was selected by Maggie Nelson as winner of the Gold Line Press Chapbook Competition.
Kelly Caldwell (1988-2020), Founding Editor
The Spectacle was founded by trans poet, writer, artist, and scholar Kelly Caldwell, who co-edited the magazine with her partner, Cass Donish. Kelly’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Entropy, Fence, Mississippi Review, The Missouri Review, Phoebe, Seneca Review, MAKE Magazine, Slant, Pacific Standard Magazine, The Rumpus, VICE, and elsewhere. Kelly was the winner of the Norma Lowry Memorial Prize and the Cornelison English Award from Washington University in St. Louis, the winner of an Academy of American Poets University Prize, and the winner of the 2019 Greg Grummer Prize, judged by Jos Charles. To learn more about Kelly’s life and work, please read our memorial feature and visit her website.