Editorial Staff - The Metaworker Literary Magazine

Image of Elena L. Perez, former managing editor and current editor-in-chief. She has long dark brown hair worn in a bun and is smiling with teeth. She wears dangly teal leaf earrings, a green saguaro necklace, and a hot pink short-sleeved collared blouse. The background is pale green vertical stripes.

Elena Lucia Perez

^{Co-founder & Editor in chief}

Elena Lucia Perez is a Mexican-American storyteller who divides her time between writing, film, and theatre. She earned her BA in writing from the University of California, Riverside and has worked as an editor or managing editor of several literary magazines, including The Metaworker and Chapman University’s Calliope. She lives in Los Angeles where she works as a film editor and spends her free time curled up with a good book, craft-making, or photographing nature. Other things she likes are: fruit pies, NASA, dragons, the artwork of Kandinsky, and puns.

Read Elena’s work here.

Melissa Reynolds

^Editor

Melissa Reynolds is an English Major at West Virginia University and a lifelong writer. She is an active member of Morgantown Writers Group and has a few stories published here and there. She is a former editor at Everydayfiction.com and has beta read more stories for her friends than she’d care to admit. Her kids accuse her of being a crazy plant lady, but she vehemently denies any such thing as she waters her twentieth African Violet. They also accuse her of being a nerd, but finds she can’t argue the finer points in her own defense. When the weather is just right, she likes to hang out by bodies of water and stack cairns.

Read Mel’s work here.

Cerid Jones

^Editor

Cerid Jones, a lover of folk tales and myth, hails from Aotearoa (New Zealand). A creature with a lifelong passion for literature, she reads anything that transports her elsewhere or delves deep into the psyche of human nature.

An historical addiction to youth theatre (Shelia Winn Shakespeare award winner; Trinity Speech and Drama certifications), her creative practice evolved into visual arts (Honours Diploma in Art and Creativity – The Learning Connexion) and her academic endeavours (Te Herenga Waka -Victoria University of Wellington and, Massey University) resulted (finally) in a double BA in Cultural Anthropology and English Literature (including creative writing, of course).

Read/see Cerid’s work here.

Current Volunteers

M.R. Lehman Wiens
Assistant Editor

M.R. Lehman Wiens is a Pushcart-nominated writer and stay-at-home dad living in Minnesota. His work has previously appeared, or is upcoming in, F(r)iction, Short Édition, Consequence, The Wild Umbrella Literary Journal, and others. He can be found at lehmanwienswrites.com.

Read M.R.’s work here.

Grace McGuire
Slush Reader, Submissions Intern

Grace McGuire is a nonbinary poet, editor, and essayist born and raised in San Diego, California. They began performing spoken word poetry at age sixteen and carried their passion for the English language into adulthood, centering their work on the exploration of gender identity and the trials of growing up in the digital age. Their Substack, Dog-Fearing Man, features bi-weekly essays about the ways online subcultures impact our real-life relationships. Grace’s work has appeared in Advintage Press, The Ana, and Compass Rose Literary Journal.

Aedan has shoulder-length brown hair and blue-gray eyes. They are wearing a light gray cardigan over a black tshirt and they are standing in front of a brick wall.

Aedan Ferrara
Slush Reader

Aedan Ferrara is a writer and performer who grew up in California’s Inland Empire, caught between the High Desert and the high seas. Their work (and everything else about them) trends toward the experimental and absurd. When they’re not writing (or trying their best) they can be found baking dessert, caring for their houseplants, or moonlighting as a ghost hunter.

Caitlin O’Halloran
Slush Reader

Caitlin O’Halloran is a biracial Filipino-American writer living in Rochester, New York. Her poetry and fiction have been published in literary magazines, including Frozen Sea, The Prose Poem, Lost Balloon, Gone Lawn, and Twin Bird Review. She has a BA in Philosophy and History from Boston University. In her free time, she enjoys reading novels about parallel universes and time travel. She is also a big fan of epistolary and found fiction. www.caitlinohalloran.com

Read Caitlin’s work here.

Sienna Bransky
Slush Reader

Sienna Bransky is a reader and writer of most things, but primarily speculative fiction and poetry. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona and earns a living as a research technician for a soil ecology lab and as the insomniac night shift counselor for a middle school environmental science camp. When not reading, writing, sciencing, or teaching she also enjoys climbing, baking, gardening and caving.

Lena Bramsen
Contributing Writer, former: Social Media Intern, Slush Reader

Lena Bramsen recently graduated from The New School with a degree in Creative Writing and was a member of the Writing and Democracy Honors Program. She explores the odd and nostalgic through words, digital art, and miniature dioramas—inspired by themes such as Americana, womanhood, and the eerie grandeur of haunted houses. Find her on Instagram @rococoraven.

Read Lena’s work here.

Utkarsh Adhrit
Slush Reader

Read Utkarsh’s work here.

Jason Nguyen
Slush Reader

Jason Nguyen is a self-proclaiming free spirit, being a freelance video editor and writer based in the smaller cities in Orange County, California. As such, he spends his time traveling freely to see the sights and see the world through helping out as much he can. He currently volunteers as a Boy Scout Leader outside of work pitches where he can to the good of nature and of supervision within the succeeding generations.

Cansu Açıkgöz
Slush Reader

Cansu Açıkgöz is a writer and editor based in Ankara, Turkey. Her work explores the fractures between memory and forgetting, the acoustics of silence, and the invisible stories in everyday details. She has worked on the Turkish editions of books by James Joyce, Donald Keene, and on a work on Dante. She feels kinship with the streets of Bruno Schulz, the clarity of Agota Kristof, the precision of Vladimir Nabokov, and the uncanny worlds of Shirley Jackson. When not writing, she disappears into the noisy silence of living with her cats; like Nabokov, she believes books last longer than girls.

Lissa Muir
Podcast Transcription Editor

Lissa Muir writes short fiction and non-fiction from Toronto, some of which she posts on her Substack, Middle Aged Neophyte. Periodically, she wrestles with the YA novel that has been lurking in her files since 2015. When not writing, she listens to podcasts while going on increasingly slow walks with her fourteen-year-old Newfoundland dog, Molly.

Julia C Gaytan
Slush Reader

Julia C Gaytan is a self-proclaimed math geek who spends her weekdays teaching high school math and her weeknights battling her inner demons with poetry and short stories through the sword of the pen(cil). It is in this space that she embraces her truth while also exploring different identities and realities, all the while clothing her pieces in mathematical and scientific garments. Julia grew up in the Nickerson Gardens, a housing project of Watts, and attended inner city k-12 schools until attending UCLA as an undergraduate and then graduate student. It is there where she learned the importance of acknowledging her roots and identity as a Chicana poet. Recently, her work was published in The Waiting Ro o m, an anthology by Nervous Ghost Press. She currently lives with her two children in southern California.

Amita Basu
Contributing Writer,
former: Slush Reader

Amita Basu’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in over sixty magazines and anthologies including The Penn Review, Bamboo Ridge, Another Chicago Magazine, The Dalhousie Review, and Funicular. She is a submissions reader and review board member at Bewildering Stories, contributing editor at Fairfield Scribes Microfiction, interviews editor and sustainable living columnist at Mean Pepper Vine, and slush reader at The Metaworker. She lives in Bangalore, has a PhD in cognitive science, works in sustainable behaviour, and blogs at http://amitabasu.com/

Read Amita’s work here.

Wendy Lew
Social Media Intern

Max Zell
Slush Reader

Read Max’s work here.

Frank Garcia Marquez
Slush Reader

Helen Croteau
Slush Reader

Helen is an avid reader, writer, and crafter. She enjoys a variety of genres and mediums, but is especially interested in comics and other illustrated works. She graduated from Brandeis University with a degree in English and creative writing, and has found a love of working with kids in her job as an afterschool teacher.

Katherine Charlton
Slush Reader

Katherine Charlton is a Canadian writer with a bachelor’s degree in English Literature. She enjoys reading works from nearly every genre, but particularly loves gothic and psychological fiction. She especially enjoys works that creatively use themes of the uncanny or surreal to subtly discuss current events. Katherine lives in Busan, South Korea, where she works and continues to read and write. In her spare time, she enjoys studying languages, hiking, and playing with her cat.

Dustin P Brown
Slush Reader

Dustin P Brown is an author and editor of poetry and prose. He received his BA in Creative Writing from Western Michigan University and currently works as an editor and an interpreter. He has forthcoming and recent publications in NonBinary Review, LitShark, American Religion Journal, Penumbric Speculative Fiction Magazine, among others. These days he lives in Spain with his boyfriend and two cats.

Nick Farina
Slush Reader

Nick Farina is an aspiring writer from South Florida. He studied creative nonfiction at NYU this summer in the Writers in New York program. His prose has been published by the online literary magazine, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood. Nick is currently applying to MFA programs. When he isn’t busy writing, he is likely hanging out with his brother’s three-year old golden retriever, Piper.

Riley Wray
Slush Reader

Riley Wray is a nonbinary writer and artist who loves twisting every day life into the surreal. Raised in Ontario, Canada, they grew up reading anything they could get their hands on. When they’re not writing or drawing, Riley is often spoiling their pet rabbit and two cats.