Editor-in-Chief
Caroline Crew
Caroline Crew is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she serves as Editor in Chief of Pleiades: Literature in Context. Her poetry and prose appears in POETRY, Kenyon Review and The Believer, among others. Author of the essay collection Other Girls to Burn, winner of the AWP Prize, her next book is a poetry collection, Don’t Cut Your Own Bangs, from YesYes Books, and she is co-editor of the posthumous New and Selected Poems of Molly Brodak, forthcoming with the University of Iowa Press. Recent excerpts of her work in progress, FEAST, a hybrid work exploring food and grief through prose sonnets, appear in AGNI and The Massachusetts Review. Crew holds degrees from the University of St Andrews, the University of Oxford, the University of Massachusetts, and Georgia State University. Originally from Kernow (Cornwall), Crew lives in Kansas City, where she co-owns the bookstore, Turnsol Books.
Managing Editor
Claude-Canese Jarboe
Claude-Canese Jarboe is the author of SISSY (Garden-Door Press, 2024) and the chapbook dark acre (Willow Springs, 2018). Their work has recently appeared in American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Poetry, and elsewhere. Jarboe is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kansas Arts Council. They live in Kansas City and teach creative writing at University of Central Missouri.
Production Editor
David Wojciechowski
David Wojciechowski is the author of Dreams I Never Told & Letters I Never Sent (Gold Wake Press). His poems have appeared in Bateau, Jellyfish Magazine, The Laurel Review, Meridian, Figure 1, and other journals as well as in the collaborative writing anthology They Said (Black Lawrence Press). He is a freelance designer and teaches writing and literature in Syracuse, NY. David can be found online at davidwojo.com and on Twitter @MrWojoRising.
Poetry Editor
Nicole Higgins
Nicole Higgins is a poet and assistant professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Central Missouri, where she also works with educators across disciplines and grade levels as co-director of the Greater Kansas City Writing Project. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Georgia and a PhD in English from Duke University. Her creative work has been supported by fellowships from Cave Canem and Callaloo, and appears in the Ocean State Review, the museum of americana, Dream Pop, Pleiades, at the American Jazz Museum, and elsewhere.
Associate Poetry Editor
S.A. Leger
S.A. Leger is a poet and ornithologist whose work moves between ecology and intimacy, tracing the prisms of climate and catastrophe. For more than a decade, she worked as a biologist, researching and monitoring birds and whales across Newfoundland and Labrador, Tasmania, and the Salish Sea. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Pleiades: Literature in Context, The Hopkins Review, The Los Angeles Review, Third Coast, The Pinch, and elsewhere. She lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland (Ktaqmkuk), where her best days are spent at a cabin in the woods with her wife and dachshund.
Digital Editor
Ashe Prevett
Ashe Prevett is the author of the chapbook Still, No Grace (Madhouse Press, 2021), which received the 2020 Madhouse Editors’ Prize and a 2022 Georgia Author of the Year Award from the Georgia Writers Association. Her poetry has appeared in such journals as West Branch, Sixth Finch, Denver Quarterly, and others, and her prose has appeared in Sycamore Review and Drunk Monkeys, among others. She received her MFA from Georgia State University.
Assistant Poetry Editor
Charlene Hills
Charlene Hills (they/them) is a recent graduate from the University of Central Missouri, where they studied English and Digital Media Production. They have been previously published in issues of Arcade magazine and awarded the 2025 Baker-Starzinger Poetry Award. You can find them @charlemain.media on Instagram.
Fun Facts:
- Has produced, directed, and shot their own video for one of their poems titled “Glass Bottle Streets (A visual poem)” on YouTube.
- They enjoy playing Dungeons and Dragons and Magic The Gathering with friends.
Fiction Editor
Brandi Wells
Brandi Wells is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at California State University, Fullerton. They have a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from University of Southern California and an MFA in creative writing from University of Alabama. Their novel, Cleaner was published by Wildfire/Headline (UK) and Hanover Square Press/Harpercollins (US).
Assistant Fiction Editor
Natalie D’Allura
Natalie D’Allura has an AA in Art and a BA in English from Fullerton College and California State University, Fullerton respectively. Her fiction has been published in the little things: literary magazine, and she has written for Orange Coast Magazine, Winterbourne House and Garden, and the University of Birmingham. While studying abroad in England, she curated and published do you see me as I am?: an anthology for the University of Birmingham’s annual DIY Arts Festival. She lives in Southern California, where she enjoys basking in the sun and cracking the spines of her books.
Assistant Fiction Editor
Bethany Serrano
Bethany Serrano received a B.A. in English with a minor in Creative Writing from the University of California Irvine. She recently graduated from California State University Fullerton with an M.A in English concentrating on memoir style writing. Here, she served students as a writing tutor. Her work has appeared in The Underground literary journal and she worked on the production of CSUF’s zine titled Plastic People.
Nonfiction Editor
Ashley Anderson
Ashley Anderson is the author of the essay collection Sifting the Feminine: Essays on a Woman’s Body (University of Georgia Press, 2026.) Her creative nonfiction, fiction, and criticism have appeared in Quarter After Eight, Permafrost, Newfound, Tahoma Literary Review, Wraparound South, SLAB, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, and others. She holds a PhD in English with a creative writing emphasis from the University of Missouri and MA degrees from Kent State University and the University of Cincinnati. When not writing or teaching, Ashley can often be found drinking a lot of coffee, making a lot of crafts, and listening to a lot of Taylor Swift.
Fun Facts:
- Tacos are my all-time favorite food.
- I stayed at the worst AirBnB of my life at an AWP conference.
- I named my car Kiwi the Kia.
Translation Editor
Nancy Naomi Carlson
Nancy Naomi Carlson is an award-winning poet, translator, essayist, and editor. She received the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, along with grants from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Albertine Translation Fund. In 2018, she was named Chevalier of the Order of the Academic Palms by the French government.
She is the author of several poetry collections, including Piano in the Dark (2023) and An Infusion of Violets (2019), featured in The New York Times Book Review. Her translations of writers such as Khal Torabully, Abdourahman Waberi, and René Char have received international recognition.
Her work appears in journals including Poetry, The Paris Review, and The Kenyon Review Online. She serves as Translations Editor for On the Seawall. In addition, she is a professor of graduate counseling at Walden University and holds two doctoral degrees in foreign language methodology and counselor education and supervision. https://www.nancynaomicarlson.com/
Translation Editor
July Westhale
July Westhale was born in the American Southwest. Their books include moon moon, Trailer Trash, Unmade Hearts, and Via Negativa, which Publishers Weekly called “stunning” in a starred review. Ocean Vuong chose Westhale as the 2018 University of Arizona Poetry Center Fellow. Along with Mathew Weitman and Felipe Acevedo Riquelme, they are a co-editor and translator for the Unsung Masters series collection Rolando Cárdenas: The Life and Work of a Chilean Master. Their poetry and translations have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry International, McSweeney’s, The National Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others. July is represented by Carolyn Forde at Transatlantic and lives in Tucson, where they are adapting their novel to film. www.julywesthale.co
Interviews and Reviews Editor
Beth Ward
Beth Ward is a culture writer, essayist, and editor, writing about books and art, bodies and place, feminism and folklore. Her work focuses primarily on women’s histories and women’s stories. Beth’s award-winning creative nonfiction, literary criticism, reviews, interviews, and essays appear widely in publications including Oxford American, The Rumpus, Iron Horse Literary Review, Southeast Review, Bitter Southerner, Hyperallergic, Cunning Folk, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in narrative nonfiction from the University of Georgia. You can find her online at @bethwardwriting and www.bethwardwriting.com.
Social Media Manager
Promise Clutter
Promise Clutter is from Kansas City & is an editor of Turnsol Editions. She co-owns the bookstore, Turnsol Books.
Logistics Manager
Patrice Harris
Patrice Harris serves as the Department of English Office Professional and the Logistics Manager for the literary journal Pleiades, and for Pleiades Press. She holds both a bachelor’s degree in public relations and a master’s degree in mass communication from the University of Central Missouri (UCM). Her professional experience spans promotions, administrative tasks, live music sound engineering, and on-air radio work. As an author Harris’ published works include the poems “Tiny Fragile Thing” and “Bamboo Haiku,” featured in the Poetry in the Park Series for Warrensburg, Missouri Parks and Recreation. Additionally, Harris wrote the short story “Samuel,” published in the Mystic Springs anthology, as well as the scholarly chapter “Prolific Stereotypes of Black Men and Images of Black Masculinity in Tyler Perry’s ‘Diary of a Mad Black Woman,’” which appears in the anthology Interpreting Tyler Perry: Perspectives on Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality.