KARTIKA BUDHWAR lives in Houston,Texas. She is an editor at Ripe Fiction (hello!) and at the South Asian Avant-Garde Collective. She also moonlights as a PhD Candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Houston, an Imprint Fellow, and an educator for Writers in the Schools. You can find her fiction, nonfiction and poetry in Arts and Letters, Blue Mesa Review, and the Indiana Review, among other journals.

Find her on Instagram (@kartikalikesithere) or Twitter (@Kartika_Budhwar)

CURRENTLY CRAVING: Tell me an inconsolable story, a raucous story, a delicate story, a rude story, a well-crafted story, an anti-craft story, a true story. Tell me a story I’ve never heard before. Tell me the oldest story in the world. Tell it to me the way only you can. 

I love it when you give me prose that offers deep, loving attention to every sentence. Give me your sentences full of duendes, silences, and saturations. I love it when you give me what I never even knew I wanted. 

Break my heart. Make me angry. Make me cackle. Make me mourn. Make me marvel. Make me blush. Make me riot. Remake me. 

CAROLIENA CABADA writes fiction and poetry about extreme weather, volcanoes, and Filipino families. She teaches first-year composition and creative writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she is also earning her PhD in English. Her fiction has been published in JMWW, Barren Magazine, and was selected for Best Small Fictions 2021. Find her @cecaroliena on Twitter and Instagram. 

CURRENTLY CRAVING: Stories that feature the forgotten, the overlooked, the marginalized. Stories that take a small happenstance and make me see how it encompasses the global. Stories that make the argument that every issue is the same issue, and reveals a connection where most people would see a gap. Stories that walk the line of prose and poetry.

I’m most familiar with realistic literary stories, but will gladly shout a well-written fabulist, magical realist, or solarpunk story from the rooftops.

 JESSICA LUKE GARCIA (any pronouns) is a nonbinary queer writer and editor of speculative fiction, horror and romance from the haunted borderlands of the rural American midwest. They currently live in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain with their husband, Erik, and Antigonus, a retired stray general/cat, where they drink wine in the ocean and ghostwrite smutty romance novels.

They can be found on Twitter and Instagram @10itemsorjess.

CURRENTLY CRAVING: Speculative futurism, New Weird interpolation, darkest timeline prophecies, cathartic splatterpunk and spiteful hopepunk. Tales of anti-capitalism, rebellion, revolution, and anarchistic fuck-you.

I’m a sucker for punchy opening lines and gut-punchy endings. Give me slick dialogue and slicker characters. Show me big-money moments preserved in amber: the decision that should never have to be made, the hard-earned triumph, the tailspin, the crash site, the aftermath.