SEAN ZERO has lived in Tampa, London, and Honolulu. He’s been in Portland for the last 10 years, currently in the Pearl with his partner and cat. He loves art, books, and coffee.

Before founding her band Public Universal Friend (PUF) in 2019, Friend began writing, recording, and performing original work in her mid teens and continued as a (mostly) solo artist for what would become a decade. PUF is known for their multifaceted embrace of punk informed americana adorned in southern gothic grit, attracting audiences rooted primarily in the midwest and Friend’s native south. Their debut album Perennials saw its independent release in March 2021, garnering attention from NPR, Mahogany, New Noise, and Emmy Award winning production Music in Transit. To date, Friend has written and recorded 11 albums of original music, with PUF’s next record Chrysalis expected to release in early 2023.

Friend came out publicly as a gay trans woman in 2021 following many years of genderqueer presentation. Her gender identity has played a major role in her ownership of the spectral nature of outward expression, with work focused mainly on trans representation and queer bodies within the commercial fashion and fine art world.

Friend is also the author of Transangelicism, a memoir recounting a closeted trans daughter’s adolescence in the evangelical South, anchored in the turning point found in young adulthood. The work serves as a touchstone for queer southerners, boldly encountering the vulnerability, visibility, and authenticity required in the narrative of her personal experience of trans reality. In the middle of all of it, Friend also graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Drawing from ETSU in 2015. The portfolio for her visual work can be found here.

cosima bee concordia is a femme leatherdyke based in Portland, Oregon who loves devotion and God. In past lives she’s been a bookseller, an English teacher, a philosophy student, and a limp-wristed sissy, but these days she’s a writer of horror, essays, theory, and weird experimental fragments as well as a co-host for a podcast about religious eroticism, anti-fascism, and queer perversion called Drunk Church. 

Her whole thing is pushing the boundaries of body and self in both her intimacy and art, and since contracting covid she’s been settling into her chronically ill mystic era. She generally can be found around the internet as bimbo theory, and you can keep up with and support her work by subscribing to her Patreon and Substack.

Dara Barrois/Dixon (formerly Dara Wier) was born in Louisiana on December 30, 1949. She received her MFA in 1974 from Bowling Green State University.

Barrois/Dixon is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina (Wave Books, 2022); In the Still of the Night (Wave Books, 2017); You Good Thing (Wave Books, 2013); Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2009); Remnants of Hannah (Wave Books, 2006); Reverse Rapture (Wave Books, 2005), which received the 2006 San Francisco State University Poetry Center Book Award; Hat On a Pond (Wave Books, 2002); Voyages in English (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2001); Our Master Plan (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998), which received the Phi Beta Kappa Award; Blue for the Plough (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1992); The Book of Knowledge (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1988); All You Have in Common (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1984); The 8-Step Grapevine (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1980); and Blood, Hook & Eye (University of Texas Press, 1977).

About Barrois/Dixon’s work, John Ashbery has said:

It may not be for the faint of heart—most intense experiences aren’t—but those who stay with it will find themselves face to face with a world whose eerily sharp focus suggests recent satellite photographs of Mars. And they will never be the same again.

The Harvard Review has published the following about her work:

Recalling at moments the philosophical comedy of Wallace Stevens and Wislawa Szymborska, many of Wier’s colloquial stanzas draw a reader away from a recognizable world into one in which women waltz with bears, houseflies chat with colonels, and the absence of sound makes a material presence.

Barrois/Dixon’s work has been included in recent volumes of Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her poetry has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and American Poetry Review. In 2005, she held the Rubin Distinguished Chair at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. She has been poet in residence at the University of Montana, the University of Texas at Austin, Emory University, and the University of Utah.

Barrois/Dixon lives and works in Factory Hollow in Greenfield, Massachusetts.Description text goes here

Emily Kendal Frey is the author of Lovability (Fonograf Editions, 2021); Sorrow Arrow (Octopus Books, 2014), winner of the 2015 Oregon Book Award for Poetry; and The Grief Performance (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011).

Frey is a teacher and therapist and lives in Portland, Oregon.

Juleen Eun Sun Johnson is an interdisciplinary BIPOC writer and artist. Johnson was born in Seoul, South Korea. She was adopted at three and taken to Valdez, Alaska. Johnson earned an MFA in Visual Studies from PNCA and an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Fellowship. Johnson is also a 2023 recipient of the Cannon Beach Art Association Grant for art and writing.

Johnson’s work has been published in: The Rio Grande Review, Whiskey Island Magazine, The Dunes Review, Poetry Northwest and other journals and anthologies. Her poem won the Zone 3 Press Prize for Poetry. Johnson’s poems have been nominated for the Best of Net. She is the founder and editor of Trestle Ties: A Landscape of Emergence.

Her debut chapbook, “Topography of Materials” was published by Bottlecap Press in 2023.

Johnson lives in Astoria, OR with her husband Aaron and two cats (Tobias and Bruce).

John Morrison earned his MFA from the University of Alabama and received the 2003 C. Hamilton Bailey Poetry Fellowship from Literary Arts. His book, Heaven of the Moment, won the 2006 Rhea & Seymour Gorsline Poetry Competition and was a finalist for the 2008 Oregon Book Award in poetry. His poems have appeared in numerous national literary journals, including the Cimarron Review, Poetry East, Southern Poetry Review, and Poet Lore. He has taught poetry at the University of Alabama, Washington State University, Vancouver, and the Attic Writers Workshop in Portland, Oregon.

Zachary Schomburg’s most recent book of poems is called Fjords v2, and he also wrote a novel called Mammother. He’s a painter, an illustrator, and a publisher of a small independent press, Octopus Books. He lives in PDX, OR with B and Y.

Michael Keefe is the author of the novel All Her Loved Ones, Encoded (Running Wild Press, 2024) and the forthcoming collection Western Terminus: Stories and a Novella (Cornerstone Press, 2025). He is the Events Coordinator and Publicist at Annie Bloom's Books, an independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon, where he lives with his wife, the author Liz Prato, and their two cats.

KIMBERLY KING PARSONS is the author of the national bestselling novel We Were the Universe, a Dakota Johnson Book Club pick the New York Times calls “a profound, gutsy tale of grief’s dismantling power.” Parsons’s story collection, Black Light, was longlisted for the National Book Award and the Story Prize. A recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and Columbia University, Parsons won the 2020 National Magazine Award for “Foxes,” a story published in The Paris Review. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her partner and children.

Ananda Lima is a poet, fiction writer, and translator, the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor Books) and the poetry collection Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press), winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in four chapbooks, including Amblyopia (Bull City Press) as well as publications such as The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Witness, and elsewhere. She has served as a mentor at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Immigrant Artist Program, and currently serves as a Program Curator at StoryStudio Chicago and a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark. Craft, her fiction debut, has received starred reviews from Kirkus Review, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal, which described it as “one of the most original and unforgettable reads of the year.” Originally from Brazil, she lives in Chicago.

Strange, intimate, haunted, and hungry—Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is an intoxicating and surreal fiction debut by award-winning author Ananda Lima.

“An astounding new voice.” —ERIC LaROCCA • "I love it so much.” —KELLY LINK • “Trippy, eerie, wry, and always profound.” —JOHN KEENE • “Incredible. Truly wondrous.” —KEVIN WILSON • "Heart-wrenching and wickedly funny." —GWEN KIRBY • “Propulsive, uncanny, and expertly built.” —JULIA FINE

At a Halloween party in 1999, a writer slept with the devil. She sees him again and again throughout her life and she writes stories for him about things that are both impossible and true.

Lima lures readers into surreal pockets of the United States and Brazil where they’ll find bite-size Americans in vending machines and the ghosts of people who are not dead. Once there, she speaks to modern Brazilian-American immigrant experiences–of ambition, fear, longing, and belonging—and reveals the porousness of storytelling and of the places we call home.

With humor, an exquisite imagination, and a voice praised as “singular and wise and fresh” (Cathy Park Hong), Lima joins the literary lineage of Bulgakov and Lispector and the company of writers today like Ted Chiang, Carmen Maria Machado, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.

Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil includes: “Rapture,” “Ghost Story,” “Tropicália,” “Antropógaga,” “Idle Hands,” “Rent,” “Porcelain,” “Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory,” and “Hasselblad.”

A great next read for fans of Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties and V. E. Schwab's The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.

Recommended reading by Chicago Review of Books, Electric Literature, The Kenyon Review, and more!

"A terrific fiction debut... The stories, and the stories within those stories, connect to some of the cruelest portions of the human experience with uncommon warmth and wit."" —Publishers Weekly, starred review"

"One of the most original and unforgettable reads of the year." —Library Journal, starred review

"Will delight readers crushed under the weight of the contemporary world." —Kirkus, starred review

"This collection explores everything from the unique experiences of loss, fear, and disconnection felt by Brazilian immigrants to the U.S. to the frustrating pain of being a writer or photographer in an increasingly corporate, dystopian world." —Booklist

"Here is a collection of stories that not only delights in its ability to subvert the reader’s expectations but also leaves one haunted." —The Kenyon Review

"A perfect balance of humor, heart, and hauntedness.... I expect Craft to immediately put Lima in the company of writers like Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link, and Samanta Schweblin." —Chicago Review of Books (Most Anticipated)

"Formally playful, whimsically supernatural, and darkly witty, poet Lima’s prose debut sucked me in from the first page." —Publisher Weekly (Top 10 Summer Reads)

"A series of surrealist, spooky, sexy tales that are completely unpredictable and utterly fascinating. Using a unique blend of horror and literary weirdness, Lima’s work discusses what it means to belong (or not) in another land, to search for home, and to discover who the devil might really be." —Reactor

“Sexy and absorbing…. Absolutely breathtaking.” —Lightspeed Magazine

"My only problem with this book is the title, and that’s because I love it so much. Ananda Lima didn’t write these stories for the Devil, she wrote them for me! An absolutely thrilling reminder that short stories can be the best kind of magic, conjuring up not only the devil, but real emotion, real surprise, real strangeness.” —Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love

“Sophisticated and totally engrossing, Ananda Lima’s Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is easily one of the most innovative works I’ve read in quite some time. Interlocked stories form a cohesive and unique vision in this haunting collection from an astounding new voice.” —Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

"I was blown away by Ananda Lima's Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil. Propulsive, uncanny, and expertly built, Craft unearths truths about fiction writing, the contemporary immigrant experience, and what it means to live a life of art, all in the clean, marvelous prose of a decorated poet." —Julia Fine, author of What Should Be Wild

“Trippy, eerie, wry, and always profound, Lima achieves what most writers strive for, taking the reader on unexpected but always satisfying journeys while balancing the speculative and the real. Lima’s stories keep you thinking and reading. A gifted poet as well as a fiction writer, she knows how to create worlds that draw you in and leave you wanting more. By every measure, Craft: Stories I Wrote For the Devil, marks a wondrous fictional debut.” —John Keene, National Book Award-winning author of Punks: New and Selected Poems

"The stories in Ananda Lima's incredible collection do something nearly impossible. They open up surreal and strange worlds that somehow resonate within the private spaces of our own hearts. Lima's writing, like the best works of literature, confronts the fear of putting words on the page and transcends that fear to make something truly wondrous." —Kevin Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of Now Is Not the Time to Panic

"Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is a beautiful work of alchemy: strange and familiar, experimental and narrative, topical and timeless, heart wrenching and wickedly funny. No story is without an eye to the larger political world—from Reagan Halloween costumes to Americans dispensed from vending machines—and yet no story forgets the vulnerable human hearts that exist within that world, just trying to survive and care for one another, day after day. These stories weave a world entirely their own and beckon you to stay with the charm of Lima’s devil himself. I would have stayed forever. " —Gwen Kirby, author of Shit Cassandra Saw

"Ananda Lima spins us brilliant, resonant tales of people trying to make it through this absurd life. The stories in Craft amuse, entice, and entrap the reader with their devilish intimacy and beautiful prose." —Vanessa Chan, author of The Storm We Made

"Strange, shocking, and downright satisfying. The slim collection hits above its weight class and does more in less than 200 pages than most books do in double the length." —Debutiful, Most Anticipated Debut Books of 2024

“A wild and surrealistic story collection that pays homage to Kafka and Cortázar, Ananda Lima’s Craft seeks to disrupt reductive understandings of both the immigrant experience and the art and craft of writing." —Restless Book

"Devilish, divine, debut." —Ms. Magazine

Michelle Kicherer writes fiction and covers books and music for the San Francisco Chronicle and Willamette Week. Her writing has been published in Forbes, Portland Monthly, The Berkeley Fiction Review, 580 Split, The Deli, The Bay Bridged, SF Station, The Cutaway, Into The Void, Rose City Review and many others. Michelle is a writing instructor for Literary Arts, Litquake, Portland Community College and Writing Workshops. She loves to teach and is always encouraging her students to get a little weirder.

Zaji Cox has been creating stories since she started reading at age three, discovering her passion for writing when she wrote her first short story at nine years old. She started with self-publishing at a young age, completing a fantasy adventure book at age thirteen and a collection of short stories in high school. She quickly realized the value of relating fantastic events - some joyful, some dark - to how we experience the world as we think we know it. She was the winner in the poetry category of Submission PDX’s reading series in 2020, and has been invited to participate in several events including the Portland Book Festival, PDX Poetry Festival, Survival of the Feminist reading series, Moved By Words: New Voices of Color, Corporeal Writing’s LOOP, the 50th annual Northwest Folklife Festival, XRAY FM's Amplify Women teach-in for International Women's Day, and more. She holds a BA in English, and her writing can be found in Pathos Literary Magazine, Entropy Magazine, The Portland Metrozine, Cultural Daily, CARE Covid Art REsource, 2020: The Year of the Asterisk (released October 2021 from University of Hell Press) and others. Her memoir, Plums for Months, was released from Forest Avenue Press in May of 2023.

Matan Gold (he, him, siya) is a Black & Filipino(x) writer from the San Fernando Valley. His essay 'We Real Cool' was selected for the 2020 Best American Essays 'Notable List'. His essay 'Wade in the Water' was a finalist for Black Warrior Review's 2020 Non-Fiction Prize. He's probably walking his dog.

Jessica E. Johnson (she/they) is the author of the book-length poem Metabolics (Acre Poetry Series), the chapbook In Absolutes We Seek Each Other (New Michigan Press), and the memoir Mettlework (Acre Books).

Jessica is a career community college instructor based in Portland, Oregon. They are interested in inclusive learning environments, knowledge production, radical care, and the relationships between art, friendship, community, and social change. They work to make spaces for thinking, feeling, and learning together.

She is a contributor to Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, and her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, The New Republic, Poetry Northwest, 32 Poems, Prairie Schooner, River Teeth, DIAGRAM, Annulet Poetics, Dream Pop, Terrain, The Southeast Review, and Sixth Finch, among others. She co-hosts the Constellation Reading Series.

Their honors include an Oregon Literary Fellowship, many Pushcart nominations, and a Best of the Net nomination. “The Ghost Road” (Southeast Review) was a Best American Essays notable. In Absolutes We Seek Each Other was a DIAGRAM chapbook contest winner and In Absolutes and Metabolics were finalists for an Oregon Book Award in poetry.

Hannah Gadsby has been a comedian for more than a decade but it was 2018 when the world took notice when their ground breaking comedy special launched on Netflix and stopped the comedy world in its tracks.

Nanette earned Hannah an Emmy, a Peabody, an Australian Academy Award, and the Most Outstanding Show awards at both the Melbourne Comedy Festival and Edinburgh Fringe. Since then, Hannah did two more solo stand-up comedy shows which toured the world – selling out houses across the USA, Australia and Europe, including the Sydney Opera House, the Royal Festival Hall, the Kennedy Centre, the London Palladium and the Opera House at BAM.

Hannah’s second Netflix special, Douglas launched in 2020, and their third, Something Special landed on Netflix May 2023. Douglas was nominated for an Emmy and won an Australian Academy Award as did Something Special.

In 2022, they also managed to publish their New York Times Best Selling memoir, Ten Steps To Nanette in more than ten languages, chatted with the likes of Colbert and Fallon and hosted a gala at the Montreal Just For Laughs comedy festival.

Hannah also co-curated an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, taking part in the global celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Picasso's death featuring works from the Musée Picasso in Paris alongside those from the Brooklyn Museum's Feminist Art Collection.

Hannah's fourth special with Netflix was recorded in 2023 and launched in 2024, recorded in London, the Gender Agenda bought together gender queer comedians from around the world.

Official Website: http://hannahgadsby.com.au/

Official Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hannahgadsbycomedy/

Official Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hannah_gadsby/

Official Twitter: https://twitter.com/hannahgadsby

Official YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjKYt9J3l4N7s03Ngw1k_2w

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Multi-award-winning Hannah Gadsby broke comedy with their show Nanette. Now they take us through the defining moments in their life and their powerful decision to tell the truth—no matter the cost.

“Hannah is a Promethean force, a revolutionary talent. This hilarious, touching, and sometimes tragic book is all about where their fires were lit.”—Emma Thompson

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: PopSugar, Vulture

“There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself,” Hannah Gadsby declared in their show Nanette, a scorching critique of the way society conducts public debates about marginalized communities. When it premiered on Netflix, it left audiences captivated by their blistering honesty and their singular ability to take viewers from rolling laughter to devastated silence. Ten Steps to Nanette continues Gadsby’s tradition of confounding expectations and norms, properly introducing us to one of the most explosive, formative voices of our time.

Gadsby grew up as the youngest of five children in an isolated town in Tasmania, where homosexuality was illegal until 1997. They perceived their childhood as safe and “normal,” but as they gained an awareness of their burgeoning queerness, the outside world began to undermine the “vulnerably thin veneer” of their existence. After moving to mainland Australia and receiving a degree in art history, Gadsby found themselves adrift, working itinerant jobs and enduring years of isolation punctuated by homophobic and sexual violence. At age twenty-seven, without a home or the ability to imagine their own future, they were urged by a friend to enter a stand-up competition. They won, and so began their career in comedy.

Gadsby became well known for their self-deprecating, autobiographical humor that made them the butt of their own jokes. But in 2015, as Australia debated the legality of same-sex marriage, Gadsby started to question this mode of storytelling, beginning work on a show that would become “the most-talked-about, written-about, shared-about comedy act in years” (The New York Times).

Harrowing and hilarious, Ten Steps to Nanette traces Gadsby’s growth as a queer person, to their ever-evolving relationship with comedy, and their struggle with late-in-life diagnoses of autism and ADHD, finally arriving at the backbone of Nanette: the renouncement of self-deprecation, the rejection of misogyny, and the moral significance of truth-telling.

“For fans of Gadsby, [their] delivery on the page will delight just as it does on screen. [They] remain honest, with stories that draw laughter over situations that are always based in truth—harsh or otherwise.”—Time

“Enthralling.”—The Washington Post

“A joyful read . . . Gadsby’s voice is intimate and close, and spending time with it is a lot like listening to a good friend relay a fascinating life story over a couple of pints at the bar.”—Oprah Daily

“Similar to [their] groundbreaking comedy specials Douglas and Nanette, Gadsby’s memoir reads like a conversation with a longtime friend. . . . A can’t-miss memoir that will make readers laugh, cry, and everything in between.”—Library Journal (starred review)

“In this stunning debut, Emmy Award–winning comedian Gadsby guides readers on a tour of [their] life that’s every bit as intimate, gutting, and untidy as the performance referenced in the title. . . .This stirring tale of resilience laughs in the face of the ‘inspiration porn’ industry.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Consistently self-effacing and contemplative, Gadsby acknowledges that [their] unique brand of deadpan observational comedy isn’t for everyone, especially since it often skewers ‘the two most overly sensitive demographics the world has ever known: straight white cis men and self-righteous comedians’. . . A witty and provocatively written life story.”—Kirkus Reviews