An Evening With the Editors 2025: A Lit Mag & Small Press Roundtable

Athena Dixon is an essayist and editor originally from Northeast Ohio. She is the author of the books The Incredible Shrinking Woman and The Loneliness Files. She serves as the nonfiction/hybrid editor for Split/Lip Press and as a consulting editor for Fourth Genre magazine.

Wendy Fontaine’s work has appeared in American Scholar, Jet Fuel Review, Oyster River Pages, Sweet Lit, Sunlight Press and elsewhere. She has received nonfiction prizes from Identity Theory, Hunger Mountain and Tiferet Journal, along with nominations to the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthologies. She lives in southern California with her husband and her daughter (who is now in college) and serves as flash editor at Hippocampus Magazine. Find her online at www.wendyfontaine.com or on Bluesky @wendyfontaine.

Tom McAllister is the author of four books, including the novel How to Be Safe and the new essay collection It All Felt Impossible. His short work has been published in many places, including The New York Times, The Sun, Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, and more. He is the nonfiction editor at Barrelhouse and teaches in the MFA program at Rutgers-Camden.

Alexis Paige is the author of Work Hard, Not Smart: How to Make a Messy Literary Life; and Not a Place on Any Map — two memoirs by Vine Leaves Press, where she is the nonfiction editor. Her work appears in various journals, including Longform, Hippocampus, Fourth Genre, The Rumpus, and Brevity, where Paige was an assistant editor. Winner of the New Millenium Writings Nonfiction Prize and twice a Best American Essays “Notable,” she has also received four Pushcart Prize nominations. Paige teaches in the Wilkes University Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing and is an associate Ppofessor of literature & writing at Vermont State University.

Final panelist to be confirmed.

Rae Pagliarulo, our associate editor, works as a nonprofit fundraising consultant in her lifelong home of Philadelphia. Her essays, poems, and articles have appeared in Full Grown People, bedfellows, Hippocampus, The Manifest-Station, r.kv.r.y. quarterly, the Brevity Blog, and numerous others. Her work is anthologized in The Best of Philadelphia Stories: 10th Anniversary Edition. She is the 2014 recipient of the Sandy Crimmins National Poetry Prize, a 2019 Best of the Net nominee, and a graduate of Rosemont College’s MFA program.