Kusi Okamura is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Wild Word magazine.  She was a print and broadcast journalist in her former life and her writing has been published in The Irish Times, Stinging Fly, VisualVerse and HuffPost. She was also shortlisted for the Francis MacManus Award. Originally from Ireland, she now lives with her family in Berlin, Germany.

Cory Massaro is The Wild Word‘s associate editor and fiction editor. He is a native of Ohio, U.S.A., now at home in Quito, Ecuador. He spends his time learning languages, writing, playing music, coding, and propagandizing. He actively opposes materialism, consumption-as-cultural mandate, and all forms of hegemony. He is in favor of small, robust communities and gently destroying hierarchies wherever he goes. His fiction and poetry draw on the grievances he has stored in his heart since working in technology; his dearest hope is to predict accurately how egalitarian, worker-centered societies will revive the oral tradition to weather the climate wars.

Anu Mahadev is a New Jersey-based poet, and a 2016 MFA in Poetry graduate from Drew University. She serves as Poetry Editor for the Wild Word, and was prior to this Editor-in-Chief for Jaggery Lit, and a Senior Editor for the Woman Inc. Her latest collection of poetry, A Mouthful of Sky was released in April 2022 by Get Fresh Books LLC. Her work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, and she is a 2023 alumna of the Kenyon Writers’ Workshop. She can be found at anumahadevpoet.com

Maria Behan is The Wild Word magazine’s political columnist.  She writes fiction and non-fiction. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times, Northern California Best Places, and The Huffington Post.

Mike Hembury is our Soapbox columnist.  He is an Anglo-Berliner originally from Portland, England.  He’s a writer, translator, musician, coder, sailor, environmentalist and guitar nerd in no particular order.  You can check out some of Mike’s music projects here: www.miserlou.de  www.balkonians.de  www.skarabaeus-berlin.de

Jami Ingledue is The Wild Word‘s Behind Domestic Lines columnist.  She worked as a librarian for over a decade before choosing to stay home when her son, now 4, was born. She also has a 17-year-old daughter. She makes all-natural soap and body products and sells them through her company, Dancing Bee Farms (dancingbeefarms.net). She lives with her husband, daughter, and son on an acre of land in rural Ohio, where they keep bees, garden, and brew beer.

Tim Clark is the HEAD ABOVE WATER columnist at The Wild Word and also curates the monthly JURY’S JUKEBOX. He lives in Columbus, OH. He is an employee, a husband, a  father and a blogger. You can see his blog here, Life Explained. He writes occasionally and with pride for Street Speech, a local homeless advocacy newspaper. He is contributor for The Ugly Writers and the Good Men Project. He is working on a novel.

Annie Mark-Westfall is the LETTERS FROM BERLIN columnist at The Wild Word.  She graduated from Kenyon College in Ohio. As a former Fulbright grantee and Robert Bosch Foundation fellow, she views herself as a cultural ambassador. Her day job is with an international conservation organization.

Irena Ioannou is the GAZE columnist for The Wild Word.  She writes from Crete, Greece and her work has recently appeared in Crannóg and Betty Fedora. She is currently working on her first novel. She is a mother of five.

CL Bledsoe is the NOT ANOTHER TV DAD columnist at The Wild Word. He is the author of sixteen books, most recently the poetry collection Trashcans in Love and the flash fiction collection Ray’s Sea World. His poems, stories, and nonfiction have been published in hundreds of journals and anthologies including New York Quarterly, The Cimarron Review, Contrary, Story South, and The Arkansas Review. He’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize fifteen times, Best of the Net three times, and has had two stories selected as Notable Stories of the Year by Story South‘s Million Writers Award. Originally from a rice and catfish farm in the Mississippi River Delta area of Arkansas, Bledsoe lives with his daughter in northern Virginia. He blogs at NotAnotherTVDad.blogspot.com