Staff
Editors
Beret Olsen (she/her) is a writer, editor, photographer, and long-time fan of the Oxford comma.
Her personal history includes (in no particular order): birth, the CDC, Grape Nuts™, South Dakota, Paul Wellstone, darkroom chemistry, Carleton College, very bad dogs, Teach for America, and Omar Epps’s mother.
For her first mid-life crisis, she went to art school. It was great.
Currently, Beret edits words and images in the Bay Area, where she lives with her husband and two teens. Her fiction and essays have been published in literary journals including SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, First Class Lit, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, and the Laurel Review (upcoming), as well as on her blog, Bad Parenting 101. You can find her photography at www.beretolsen.com.
Michelle Ross (she/her) is the author of four story collections: There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, winner of the 2016 Moon City Short Fiction Award (2017); Shapeshifting, winner of the 2020 Stillhouse Press Short Fiction Award (2021); They Kept Running, winner of the 2021 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction (2022); and Don’t Take This the Wrong Way, cowritten with Kim Magowan (EastOver Press 2025). Her fiction is anthologized in Best Small Fictions 2021 and 2023 (in which it was chosen as one of ten spotlighted stories); Best Microfiction 2020, 2021, 2023, 2024, and 2026; the Norton anthology, Flash Fiction America; and it is forthcoming in the 2027 Pushcart Prize anthology. She is the series editor for Best Small Fictions 2026-2027 and 2028.
Her fifth book, Squash, is forthcoming from Moon City Press in 2027.
You can also find Michelle at www.michellenross.com, as well as on Facebook, and, occasionally, on Instagram.
Kari Treese (she/her) is a writer and math educator currently living in Middle Tennessee. She dreams of returning to the Pacific Northwest. She used to be a fish person, but now she shares her home with a mutt named Syggy.
Her essays and short fiction appear in BULL, Lost Balloon, Maudlin House, CutBank, Cheap Pop, Pithead Chapel, and others. She earned her MFA in writing from Mills College in 2020.
Kari is currently working on a horror novella and a collection of (mostly) flash fiction starring apathetic women. A long-dead essay project is ruminating in the fallow fields under her nightstand. Find her on Instagram @kari_treese, at her website, and, infrequently, on threads.
Christina Lopez (she/her) writes like she reads: five things at a time while continually shifting genres. Getting an MFA in Creative Writing at Dominican University of CA was the beginning of her transition into the literary world from her former life in environmental biology, where she may or may not have encountered some benign paranormal activity. She lives with her highly-opinionated long-haired Chihuahua and dreams of beekeeping in a permaculture garden. Her writing can be found in the Tuxedo Literature and Arts Journal and is well received at open mics throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. Occasionally, she attempts poetry.
Founders
Grant Faulkner (he/him) co-founded 100 Word Story. He’s published The Art of Brevity, Fissures (a collection of 100-word stories), and All the Comfort Sin Can Provide. His stories have been included in several flash fiction anthologies, including Norton’s Flash Fiction America, New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction.
He’s also executive director of National Novel Writing Month. His book on developing a creative mindset to write year-round, Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo, was published by Chronicle Books.
He’s currently working on a book, The Secret History of the World, which can never be published for obvious reasons. He believes that the tale of Peter Rabbit tells everything one needs to know about life.
Find Grant online on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram—or on his website. Listen to his podcast, Write-minded, and subscribe to his newsletter Intimations: A Writer’s Discourse.
Lynn Mundell (she/her) co-founded 100 Word Story and co-edited through 2022.
Her writing has been published in Five Points, The Sun, SmokeLong Quarterly, Booth, New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (W.W. Norton & Company), Best Microfiction, and elsewhere. Her work has been recognized with a Lascaux Prize in Creative Nonfiction and on the Wigleaf Top 50.
Lynn is co-editor of the anthology Nothing Short Of: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story (Outpost19, 2018) and author of the chapbook Let Our Bodies Be Returned to Us (Yemassee, University of South Carolina, 2022).
Today Lynn edits Centaur, a quarterly literary journal dedicated to hybrid writing. She is an advisory board member for the U.C. Berkeley Extension Certificate Program in Writing and funds an annual scholarship at her local high school for graduating seniors dedicated to studying creative writing at the college level. Catch up with her on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and her website.
