Brenda I. Payette was born in Chicopee, MA. She is a Frances Perkins Scholar at Mount Holyoke College. She is an English major with a minor in Religion.  Her writing explores characters engaging in everyday life family dynamics and humor. She hopes to write stories that make people feel good and laugh.  She is inspired by Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf.

 

Lili LaBine grew up in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. She is a 20-year-old student studying History, English, and Education at Mount Holyoke College. She has been writing poetry and short stories for half of her life and plans to work her way towards a novel. She is drawn toward the grotesque, pulls from personal experience, and has been inspired by Plath and Poe.

 

 

Lillian (Lily) Jones, 20, grew up in Newtown, Connecticut. She currently attends Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She is a Biology Major with a Minor in English; her short stories tend to focus on the relationships between humans and animals, feelings of loneliness, and her personal ties to the LGBT+ community. She is inspired by Chekhov, Bradbury, and Vonnegut. 

 

Logan Hoffman-Smith is a third culture kid who grew up in Tokyo, Japan before spending their teen years at boarding schools around the East Coast. They are a Senior at Mount Holyoke College with a major in Politics and a minor in English. They are inspired by the sounds gulls make over harbors, the weight of pumice, strange stones. They write about identity, loss, and grief. They hate bread and love frogs.

 

 

Molly Driscoll was born and raised in Northampton, MA.  She is a Frances Perkins Scholar at Mount Holyoke College.  Her writing explores family dynamics, small-town characteristics, grief, and shame.  She is inspired by Miranda July, Haruki Murakami, and Joyce Carol Oates.

 

ren n. dinh was born in Hanoi, Vietnam. In 2012 they started high school in the U.S., and continued to pursue higher education at Mount Holyoke College. They major in English and minor in Japanese, interested in exploring international student experience, diaspora, and global popular culture. They hope to write stories that can bring comfort to people. Some of ren’s favorite reads are Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart, David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, Patrick Chamoiseau’s School Days, and Franny Choi’s Floating, Brilliant, Gone.

 

Renn Elkins is a 21-year-old from Minneapolis. He started writing fourteen years ago, when he would scribble chapters of “The Land of Faries” [sic] and “Little Red, the Adventurous Pony” during his first grade class’s lunch break. Since then, he has completed eleven full-length novel drafts, along with a few plays and piles of short stories. He likes to think that this shows improvement, or at least dedication.

 

Riley Fitzgerald is 22 and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. Initially, she attended the University of Cincinnati, where she majored first in engineering and then in English, but after 3 years transferred to Mount Holyoke College and will complete her English degree with a Psychology minor in 2020. Her short stories tend to be introspective and focus on important interpersonal relationships and her influences are Alice Munro, Alice Walker, and Joan Didion.