Editors
April Bradley, Editor and Publisher
April is a Durham, North Carolina-based writer. Her fiction and essays appear or are forthcoming in Blink Ink, CHEAP POP, CRAFT Literary, Gone Lawn, Heavy Feather Review, jmww, NANO Fiction, Narratively, New Flash Fiction Review, and Smokelong Quarterly, among others. Her work has been honored by residency support from Vermont Studio Center and Rivendell Writer’s Colony. She serves as an associate editor for fiction at Pidgeonholes and as a submissions editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. April is a Best American Essays, Best of Microfiction, Best of Small Fictions, Pushcart Prize nominee, and a graduate of Yale Divinity School. Find her online at aprilbradley and on Twitter at @april_bradley.
Amy Cipolla Barnes, Assistant Editor
Amy Cipolla Barnes has words at FlashBack Fiction, X-R-A-Y Lit, McSweeney’s, The Citron Review, jmww, Flash Frog, Janus Literary, Trampset, The Bureau Dispatch, Scraw Place, Spartan Lit, Allrecipes, The Spruce Eats, Apartment Therapy and many other sites. She’s a Fractured Lit associate editor, Gone Lawn co-editor, and reads for Taco Bell Quarterly, Retreat West, CRAFT, and The MacGuffin. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, longlisted for Wigleaf50, and included in Best Small Fictions 2022. Her debut flash collection “Mother Figures” was published by ELJ Editions in June, 2021 with a full length collection AMBROTYPES published by word west in March, 2022.
Jessie Payne, Associate Editor
Jessie Payne is a decades long vegetarian. She loves to cook, and eat what she cooks. With few legacy recipes, she enjoys creating her own. Jessie writes flash fiction, short stories and novels. Her work can be found in Ambit, Janus Literary and Popshot Quarterly. Her novella-in-flash was a finalist in the Black River Chapbook competition, and her work was shortlisted for the Cambridge Short Story Prize.
John Buhrmann
John is a writing-editing potter, boat-builder, spoon-carver, and sailor who lives and works in Durham, North Carolina. He has a Master’s degree in German Literature and works in digital security for the health care industry. His has work forthcoming in Gone Lawn.
Leonora Desar
Leonora once tried to impress a boy by cooking him hot dogs and French fries. Unfortunately, she might not have been aware of the fact that you do not make fries by boiling them on the stove. On a good note, no one died. When she is not poisoning people with her cooking or ordering takeout, Leonora is writing stories. Some of these have appeared in River Styx, Passages North, Black Warrior Review, and in Columbia Journal, where she was chosen as a finalist by Ottessa Moshfegh. She has been anthologized in Best Small Fictions 2019, Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020, and the Wigleaf Top 50 (2019 and 2020). She is fiction editor for Pidgeonholes.
Hugo Esteban Rodríguez Castañeda
Hugo is a writer and educator hailing from Mexico and the Rio Grande Valley. He is the author of “…And Other Stories” (2018, La Casita Grande Editores) as well as other short stories, poems, and essays that have appeared in places like The Airgonaut, The Acentos Review, Picaroon Poetry, Neon Mariposa, Mathematician Transmission and the Texas Poetry Calendar. He is a graduate from the University of Texas at Brownsville and the University of Texas at El Paso. His fiction has been recommended as part of Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net slates and was longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50. He also has previously worked for Bartleby Snopes and Interstellar Flight Press as a reader. A fountain pen enthusiast, he lives in Northwest Houston and is most at home at coffeehouses, shopping malls, and mosh pits.
Consulting Editors
Jennifer Martillie Bradley
Jennifer is a project architect with 13 years of experience, based in Knoxville, Tennessee. She has worked on a variety of projects, including higher education, performing arts centers, and large-scale housing. With dual graduate degrees in both history and architecture, Jennifer is especially intrigued with the intersection of history, site, and design, and how the built environment infuses meaning into our everyday experiences. She has also taught several courses at the University of Tennessee, ranging from technology courses to graduate-level theory seminars. She is an avid gardener and cook, a voracious reader, and brings her interest and experience in technical writing, editing, food culture, and foodways to RUBY.
Hillary Leftwich
Hillary is the author of Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock (CCM Press/The Accomplices 2019) and Aura, a hybrid memoir forthcoming from Future Tense Books in 2022. She is the founder and owner of Alchemy Author Services & Workshop, teaches at Lighthouse Writers, and is a professor at The Professional Creative Writing Program at the University of Denver. She also teaches Tarot and Tarot writing workshops focusing on strengthening divination abilities as well as writing and is a registered member of the Tarosophy Tarot Association and The Monroe Institute and is a student at The College of Psychic Studies. She was a Kenyon Review Workshop alumni and scholarship recipient in 2021. Her writing can be found in both print and online in Best Small Fictions (2021), The Rumpus, Entropy, The Missouri Review, and numerous other journals both in print and online. She lives in Denver with her partner, son, and cat, Larry. Find more of her writing at hillaryleftwich.com and her author editing services at alchemyauthorservices.com.
Georgiana Nelsen
Georgiana Nelsen was a poor, smart kid who had no real ambition beyond writing stories and baking perfect cookies, until good teachers pushed her to apply for scholarships and go to college. A college advisor explained that writers were too plentiful, and cookies were out of fashion. Since so many ambitious bright women had paved the way, she should go to law school. So, she did. After decades of practicing business law, she returned to words, and now bakes perfect cookies for her grandchildren. She writes all lengths of fiction. Her current projects include a Southern Gothic Novel-in-Flash and a contemporary thriller. Her fiction has appeared in Tiferet Journal, Bending Genres, Cheap Pop, Ellipsis Zine, the National Flash Flood, and others. Her work was longlisted in the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2019 and the Bath Flash Fiction Award in 2021.
Lesley Mahoney O’Connell
Lesley lives on the South Coast of Massachusetts. Her fiction has appeared in Post Road, Psychopomp, and Solstice, and has earned honorable mention recognition from Glimmer Train and Carve. She’s currently at work on a linked collection. When she’s not making up stories, she’s content strategizing and writing development and marketing copy; searching out, writing about, and making interesting food; and spending time with her husband and young son.
RUBY nameplate photograph by Honza Emler