Our Team
David Semonchik
David Semonchik is a writer from Chicagoland. He holds a B.A. in Creative Writing and Spanish from Knox College; an M.A. in English with a focus in Fiction Writing from the University of California, Davis; and an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing and Screenwriting from the James A. Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. He loves to read novellas in translation, stories under 500 words, graphic novels, and books about monsters.
WHAT I’M LOOKING FOR
I want stories that surprise me. Not in the sense of a cunning twist or a surprise ending, but rather, I want to read something I haven’t encountered before: a beautiful turn of phrase that lets me see something in the world in a new light, or an unexpected shift in language that cracks the possibilities of a narrative wide open. I’m less concerned about Big Plots/Big Stakes than I am about voice, artfully crafted sentences, and a keen eye for exacting detail. I especially love writers who are willing to take big risks, who write with a wild imagination, and who can show me their love for fiction with each carefully selected word. Experiment! Have fun! And show me again and again the joy of reading stories through your work.
Hallie Koontz
Hallie Koontz is a freelance writer and editor based in the Chicagoland area. She graduated from Cornell College (Mount Vernon, IA) with a degree in English & Creative Writing, departmental honors, and the Winifred Van Etten Award for Creativity and Scholarship in the Department and the Tom Garst Award for Academic Writing. She has been published in The Macguffin and was a finalist in the 2024 NYC Midnight 100-Word Microfiction Challenge. As a cast member and writer for the award-winning actual play podcast, Quest Friends!, she performs as a myriad of characters, writes short stories, and runs the podcast cooking blog, “America’s Quest Kitchen.”
WHAT I’M LOOKING FOR
I want stories that let me experience someone else’s brain, whether that’s through internal thought or dialogue/action. Slice of life, small stakes, and the little things that make life worth living are important to me, but above all writing that is earnest and having fun with storytelling even if the subject matter is depressing, heavy, or morbid. The world is offbeat and weird, and people are offbeat and weird, and stories that are grounded in a kind of universal experience but have a strange or off-kilter individuality to them—that’s the good stuff. I’m looking for the chance to experience someone else’s experience, to feel them agonize over a choice, think through a situation, get in over their head. Remind me how much emptier life would be without stories by showing the kind of living we craft in words.