Intrepid Voices Fund

Madeline Jane Miigwan Johnson is an Anishinaabe writer and illustrator in Minnesota. Her art is scary, silly, and fantastical, drawn from dreams and nightmares. At night, her spirit flies from her body and knocks things off of shelves in your house. You legally cannot do anything about this in America.

She has a MA in English from the University of Minnesota Duluth. She currently works as a freelance writer and artist, writing short stories, working on her novel, and illustrating comics. She likes to write stories that explore the ways people justify cruelty to themselves— that is the true horror. Also, ones which explore the ways vampires and werewolves could fight. That is frankly even truer horror.

Madeline lives with a cat who is the Devil’s Son. Visit her website at https://www.madelinejmjohnson.com.

Hridoy Kundu is an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studying neuroscience and psychology. He writes fiction and poetry, especially horror and speculative fiction built around ordinary settings that slowly become unsettling.

His fiction has received the Baen Fantasy Adventure Award Grand Prize, and his poetry is forthcoming in Prime Number Magazine. He is especially interested in stories where fear pushes characters into difficult choices, where familiar rules stop working, and where protecting one person may come at a cost to someone else.

He enjoys writing stories that make readers look differently at something ordinary after the final page, whether that is a family home, a childhood superstition, or a hallway that suddenly feels a little too long.

Zachary Maches is a writer and professional scientist, who enjoys writing horror and mystery. He has adored spooky and strange fiction all his life, reading Clive Barker, Anne Rice, and Cormac McCarthy when he was far too young to be doing so. He enjoys stories that experiment with structure, form, and perspective. Most of his published writing is as a researcher in mathematics and environmental sciences, and is arguably more terrifying than any of his fiction. He currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his fiancée, and spends much of his free time cooking, reading, and ballroom dancing.

Katie is a pediatrician and mother of two young kids currently living in the front range of Colorado. A lifelong reader and avid daydreamer, she started writing poems and fantasy scenes between urgent care patients as a way to reclaim her imagination after years of rigorous schooling. She is especially interested in the intersection of nature and humanity, and frequently finds inspiration in the beautiful Colorado wilderness. She also enjoys taking inspiration from her medical practice, and has a deep interest in the way that the environment can shape a life. 

When not writing or working, she enjoys hiking, snuggling her lazy dog, having dance parties with her kids, and finding the best sushi in town.

This is her first short story competition. 

I am Plamen V. , an award-winning freelance author with published works online and in more than 30 US and UK literary magazines. I have been writing since I was 10. I have won numerous writing contests and have received awards from different parts of the world.  

I am a creative person with big dreams and I also love to help people. I also have Certificates on Creative Writing from the UK Writing Centre, from the Open University in Scotland, a Diploma on Creative Writing from Oxford Study Centre , Eduta.com/Novel Writing course/ and from Harvard University.  I have a published novella worldwide.

Sarah Rezendes was raised in the charming coastal city of Newport, Rhode Island, and currently lives in Washington D.C. She’s been a voracious reader since she was child — reading by flashlight well past her bedtime, which she credits for sparking her love of writing. Her background in Public Health and Anthropology helped to shape the type of stories she likes to write; about the intimate relationships that bind us not just with our nuclear community, but everyone we share the world with. Typically Sarah enjoys writing romance and queer fiction, and is currently working on what she hopes to be her debut novel.

When she’s not writing or working in the community service department at American University, Sarah loves exploring the city with her partner Kenzie, and spending far too much money at the wonderful independent bookstores residing in the DMV.

John Sergio is the COO Emeritus and was a founding partner of a mid-sized investment bank; he was the COO for over 20 years until his retirement. He has enjoyed a long and rewarding career in the securities industry and has written dozens of essays and articles for national, regional, and literary publications. This is his first spec story. 

A.L. Ravenscroft is the pen name of husband-and-wife writing team Robert and Alita Cooper, based in the San Antonio, Texas area. Their work spans gothic fantasy, supernatural mystery, and paranormal fiction, emphasizing atmospheric storytelling, interconnected characters, and the enduring influence of history and folklore.

Together, they created Duskview Falls, a shared fictional setting that serves as the backdrop for an expanding collection of novels and short fiction. Their forthcoming collection, The Cross Archives: The Mysteries of Duskview Falls, follows teenage paranormal investigator Elizabeth Cross as she documents the ghosts, legends, and unexplained phenomena surrounding the town. They are also at work on The Space Between the Roses, the first novel in the Duskview Falls series.

Robert and Alita collaborate throughout the creative process, combining their strengths in character development, worldbuilding, and narrative design. Their work is published independently through Mad Mage Media, where they continue to develop fiction centered on the mysteries, histories, and inhabitants of Duskview Falls.

Website: alravenscroftauthor.com

Milanka Sulejic is a Serbian-American writer, author, and storyteller from Wisconsin whose work explores memory, family, folklore, migration, cultural inheritance, and the unsettling places where the ordinary meets the uncanny. Her fiction and nonfiction move between literary storytelling, horror, memoir, historical narrative, and folklore, often drawing on Balkan traditions and the stories carried across generations.

Her work has appeared in Written Tales Magazine, Sundial Magazine, Tales from the Moonlit Path, Phantom Flash Fiction, Gone Lawn, and other literary publications. Her recent and forthcoming work includes “The House That Kept Sunday” in Empyrean Literary Magazine, “What We Carried With Us” and “Sve je energija (Everything Is Energy)” in Književne novine in Serbia, “Monsters & Cryptids” in Carmina Magazine, and “Mašallah” forthcoming in the fall issue of Corvus. Her work “Kontinuitet” was published by Knjiverzum / Nova književna galaksija in 2026, and “The Suitcase” is included in the Stories Collection of the Gallery of Human Migration in Canada.

She is the author of The Ghost Girl Who Never Fully Left and The Girl Who Learned to Wait for No One. Her literary project What We Carry, exploring family, heritage, language, migration, memory, identity, and belonging across generations, has also led to an invitation to speak about the project at a January 2027 event at the New Yorker Hotel in New York hosted by the Tesla Science Foundation.

Her writing asks what remains after people, places, and generations change—the names, objects, stories, traditions, and memories that refuse to disappear.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=milanka+sulejic&i=digital-text&crid=34XYOG77EQLVZ&sprefix=%2Cdigital-text%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_recent_3_0_recent

https://medium.com/@milanka.sulejic

https://anglozine.com/

https://plenum.ba/