BIRDCOAT QUARTERLY
Who's in the birdcoat?
Anna Sandy Elrod
Editor in Chief
Anna Sandy Elrod is a poet and essayist whose work can be found in journals such as Pleiades, Threepenny Review, North American Review, Iron Horse, and FUGUE. Her essay "The Number of Hair" was a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2021. She holds an MFA and a PhD in poetry from Georgia State University and teaches at Kennesaw State University. She can be found at various coffee shops between Atlanta and her home in rural Georgia that she shares with her husband, daughter, and several other small creatures.
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Anna loves to read Granta, Jericho Brown, Ilya Kaminsky, The Paris Review, Diane Seuss, T. S. Eliot (she knows), The Mississippi Review, Marie Howe, Eula Biss, Guernica, Frank O’Hara, and The Sun.
Shannon Finck
Poetry Editor
Shannon Finck is a lecturer in English and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University. She earned her Ph.D. in transatlantic modernism with a secondary emphasis in global postmodern and contemporary literatures. She also holds an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction and poetry from Georgia College (GCSU) in Flannery O’Connor’s hometown of Milledgeville, GA. Her critical and creative work appear in such journals as ISLE, ASAP/J, Angelaki, a/b: Autobiography Studies, Salt Hill, Tiny Spoon, Lammergeier, The Florida Review, and FUGUE.
Shannon likes to read autotheory, speculative fiction, and experimental writing. Recent faves—not necessarily in these forms and genres—include Lovability by Emily Kendall Frey, Temporary by Hilary Leichter, and No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood.
Anya Vostrova
Essays Editor
Anya Vostrova is a writer based in Atlanta Georgia. After growing up between St. Petersburg, Russia and Long Island, New York she went on to study Russian and French literature at Bard College. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Bennington Writing Seminars. She creates and adores work that explores the building, layering, and rupture of connections in place, time, memory and language.
Lauren Mariko Scherr
Assistant Essays Editor
Lauren Mariko Scherr is a Japanese-American writer whose essays have appeared in Off Assignment, The Audacity, ANMLY, and elsewhere. She has been featured as an emerging writer by Roxane Gay and nominated for Best of the Net. After a year of traveling to 100 cities in 20 countries, Lauren is delighted to be back home in Honolulu, Hawai'i. You can also find her on Substack (@yasumi), on Instagram (@laurenmariko), and frequently in Brooklyn, where she likes to pretend she still lives.
Sharo
Assistant Poetry Editor
Sharo is a poet and musician who can often be found in cafés around Atlanta and Paris. She publishes her work on 'get carried away' and 'bones,' a digital zine that she manages via Substack. Keep an eye out for her emerging voice in the literary world.
An avid reader, her evolving taste currently gravitates toward the works of Ingeborg Bachmann, Anne Carson, Ilya Kaminsky, and George Seferis.
Additional Readers
Poetry
Accepting Readers
Essays
Chila Woychik
Ghost Peach Press
Accepting Readers