Meet Our Team

Calvin Shaw

Calvin Shaw is from Jefferson City, Missouri where he graduated from the great HBCU Lincoln University, earning his MBA in the process. He currently lives in Colorado working as a tax planning consultant and accountant. He is the Board Treasurer for the Colorado Black Health Collaborative and has served as both a selector and judge for the Colorado Humanities Colorado Book Awards. He has many works published, with poetry being his preferred literary genre. He loves listening to music, watching sports, and cooking.

Megan Casimir

Megan is a lover of dark chocolate, hip hop, and the ocean. She lives in Denver, Colorado. In 2021, she co-founded Words Beyond Walls, a youth-led organization that practices community care to prevent and intervene in community violence. She is also the Director of a program called Youth Building Legacy Now that supports students across Denver to build and sustain youth-lead programming in their neighborhood communities. She is a trained trauma therapist, educator, abolitionist, mom, reads mostly fiction, and makes a mean breakfast taco. As the Education Community Liaison for BrinkLit, she helps to connect schools and youth communities with BrinkLit programming.

Soni Brown

Soni Brown is a freelance journalist and magazine writer from Kingston, Jamaica. She is the founder and facilitator of the Papine Writing Collective — a DIY, decolonized, writing program for creative writers from the West Indies and its diaspora. Soni is currently working on a memoir of forgetting and remembering when her polydactyl cat, Priscilla Purrsley isn’t sitting on her lap. 

Patty McCrystal

Patty McCrystal is an author and editor from Arvada, Colorado. She received her MFA from Regis University. Her work can be found in Joyland Magazine, Epiphany Magazine, Oyster River Pages, JMWW Journal, Atticus Review and more, and on PBS. Her work has won the Slippery Elm Prose Prize and has received a Pushcart Prize nomination, a Best of Net nomination, and a Best American Short Stories nomination.

Patty is the Marketing and Communications Manager at RedLine Contemporary Art Center, a nonprofit arts organization in Denver. She’s also a Volunteer Editor for the Hard Times workshop, a community writing program for those experiencing homelessness and economic hardship.

Patty lives in Arvada with her husband Christopher, dog Bandit, and cat Ghost.

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Race Garber

Race has a background in editing, including fiction and non-fiction, scientific and technical papers, professional essays, and legal writing. Regardless of the nature of the writing, a powerful creation stems from strong narrative, approachable language, solid structure, and momentum-building flow. Race enjoys donating his time to Brink to assist new and established authors in suffering through the revision process and celebrating the progress.

Anya Prosser

Anya is a doctoral student of education at Columbia University’s Teachers College focusing on using superhero comics to address issues of mental health in the classroom. She taught language arts at a high school in Denver before moving to New York City to pursue higher degrees in education. Her central pedagogies are Hip Hop Education and dismantling the heteronormative white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Besides her academic work, Anya is a freelance editor. An avid Marvel fan, she will eagerly discuss why Illyana Rasputin and Lorna Dane are the best and why Scott Summers is the worst.

Dominic Loise

Dominic Loise lives with his librarian wife Jenna, their rabbits and many books. He met his wife one night over a shared love of reading Ray Bradbury. The rabbits love books too but aren’t readers. As a content creator for F(r)iction, Dominic writes book reviews, does interviews and has a series of personal essays about pop culture and mental health. He is open about and advocates for mental health awareness. Dominic can be found at @dominic_lives on Instagram & Twitter where he shares recently published work. 

Matt Peadon

Matt Peadon is a character artist and art director working in film and video games. As the only blonde Australian that can’t surf, he pivoted and opted for a more digital medium. He was part of productions like Game of Thrones, Aquaman, Underworld, and Ghostbusters and has collaborated with organisations like Weta Workshop, NASA, KikkiK, Epic Games, and Magic Leap. Matt pursues his interest in photography and Hedlund’s quips by camera-slinging for Brink.

Thomas Chisholm

Thomas Chisholm is a freelance editor, creative writer, and an alumnus of The Evergreen State College. He received a year of formal copyediting training from the University of Washington’s editing certificate program, though he especially enjoys cracking a story open and getting into developmental edits. Originally from suburban Detroit, he’s called Seattle home since 2009. His creative work has appeared in Inkwell, Drizzle Review, and Vanishing Point Magazine.

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Eileen Silverthorn

Eileen is a senior editor at F(r)iction, working on both journal submissions and the occasional review or article for F(r)Log. She loves both fiction and poetry: In fiction, Eileen looks for stories with character-driven narratives blended with detailed writing and speculative genre elements. In poetry, Eileen is drawn to imagery-heavy pieces that are unafraid to experiment with form, line breaks, and language.

Eileen is also a bookseller at the Tattered Cover in Denver, Colorado. She graduated from Colorado State University with a BA in English Creative Writing and minors in History and Women’s Interdisciplinary Studies. Inspired by her work with CSU’s undergraduate literary magazine Greyrock Review, Eileen decided to explore a career in publishing through the Denver Publishing Institute. She enjoys spending her time traveling, editing her friends’ fanfiction, reading ten books at once, spending her whole paycheck at her place of employment, and cuddling her cats whilst writing bios about herself in the third person.

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Sam Gladstone

Sam gave up studying English at the age of sixteen and would never have guessed that he would end up involved with an organization like Brink! Instead, he specializes in the languages of machines, working as a full stack developer by day and helping Brink with any tech-related queries at all times in between. He graduated with a Master of Mathematics from the University of East Anglia and is a passionate diver, helping to introduce people to the underwater world at a local club in Norfolk, UK.

Suzie Bartholomew

Suzie Bartholomew hails from Indiana and works for the Indianapolis Public Library. She earned her BA in English from Purdue University North Central (now Northwest) and her MFA in Creative Writing from Butler University. Having fully embraced her inner grandma, she loves to crochet, embroider, and live off of tea while cuddling with her cat. When she’s not working or being crafty, Suzie is focused on writing stories and indulging in serial killer documentaries.

Maribel Leddy

Maribel Leddy graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a BA in Writing Seminars. She’s originally from Buffalo, New York, but she now lives in Chicago where she works as an Associate Content Strategist at Yakkety Yak, a digital marketing agency. Outside of work, she enjoys cooking, traveling, and eating.