Michelle Elvy lives and works as an editor and manuscript assessor based in the Bay of Islands. She also edits at Blue Five Notebook and has guest edited at Smokelong Quarterly, in addition to being Assistant Editor (International) for Best Small Fictions, published by Queen’s Ferry Press and an associate editor of Flash Fiction International, published by W. W. Norton. In the southern hemisphere winter each year, you’ll find her coordinating New Zealand’s National Flash Fiction Day.

A Pushcart nominee, a three-time finalist of the Glass Woman Prize and the 2012 recipient of the NZ Society of Authors/ Auckland Museum Library grant, Michelle has published poetry, fiction, travel writing, creative nonfiction and reviews in numerous print and online journals and anthologies. Her latest flash appears here. She has also judged various writing competitions hosted by Flash Fiction World, the South Island Writers’ Association, the Whangarei Poetry Walk, 2013 NorthWrite Collaboration (with Tim Jones) and the NYC Challenge Flash (2013 & 2014) and Short Story (2014) competitions.

Michelle can be found in 2015 sailing on her 43’ sailboat, Momo, her home for twelve years, in SE Asia. Slowing life to a 5-knot pace, Michelle embraces a less-is-more approach to just about everything. Flash suits.

More at michelleelvy.com (editing) and at SV Momo (sailing). Also an interview — “Editors without Borders” — here.

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James Norcliffe is an award-winning poet, novelist and short story writer with work appearing in journals world-wide and translated into several languages. His publications include a collection of short stories, eight collections of poetry — most recently Villon in Millerton (AUP) and Shadow Play (Proverse) — and several award-winning novels for young people including The Loblolly Boy (Longacre/Random) and its successor The Loblolly Boy and the Sorcerer (Longacre/Random). His most recent books for young people are Felix and the Red Rats (Longacre/Random) 2012 and The Pirates and the Nightmaker (Longacre/Random) forthcoming 2015.

Besides his long list of publications, he also poetry editor for the Christchurch Press.  Many readers will know him from his long-time involvement in Takahē magazine. Meanwhile, he has worked more recently, with Harry Ricketts and Siobhan Harvey as editor of the major anthology Essential New Zealand Poems – Facing the Empty Page (Godwit/Random, 2014).

James Norcliffe’s flash fiction is most recently included in Flash Fiction International (W W Norton, 2015). His website and blog is here.

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Rebecca Styles (Features Editor) completed a BA (Hons) in English at the University of Otago (2010) and a MA from the International Institute of Modern Letters (Victoria University NZ, 2011), and is presently  a PhD student of Creative Writing with Massey University. Her short stories have appeared in journals such as Turbine and Takahē and in anthologies The Best New Zealand Fiction #6, Home and Creative Juices. Her work has also been broadcast on Radio New Zealand.  In 2013 her flash fiction story “Parade” was awarded second place in the National Flash Fiction competition, and her story “Oriental Bay” was recently published in the anthology Sweet As (2014).

In 2014 Rebecca presented a reflective paper, “Writing down the tower: postgraduate experiences in creative writing”, at the Professing Creativity Conference: Teaching Creative Writing in Aotearoa at Massey University Wellington (February) and another paper about narrative ethics at the Australasian Association of Writing at Massey University (November).

She blogs about New Zealand books at nzlit101.blogspot.co.nz and teaches short story writing at the Wellington High School Community Education classes. She is a committee member of the Wellington branch of the NZ Society of Authors, and also serves on the National Flash Fiction Day committee.

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Guest Editors 2015

September, science (international issue) — Kathy Fish and Tania Hershman

Kathy Fish’s stories have been published or are forthcoming in The Lineup: 25 Provocative Women Writers (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), Slice, Guernica, Indiana Review, Mississippi Review online, Denver Quarterly, New South, Quick Fiction and various other journals and anthologies. She was the guest editor of Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web 2010. She is the author of three collections of short fiction: a chapbook of flash fiction in the chapbook collective, A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness (Rose Metal Press, 2008), Wild Life (Matter Press, 2011) and Together We Can Bury It, a second printing of which is available now from The Lit Pub. She has recently joined the faculty of the forthcoming Mile-High MFA at Regis University in Denver where she will be teaching flash fiction. Additionally, she serves as Consulting Editor for the Queen’s Ferry Press series, The Best Small Fictions. She blogs at http://kathy-fish.com/.

Tania Hershman is the author of two story collections: My Mother Was An Upright Piano: Fictions (Tangent Books, 2012) and The White Road and Other Stories (Salt, 2008; commended, 2009 Orange Award for New Writers). Tania’s award-winning short stories and poetry have been widely published in print and online and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4. Tania’s  poems won 3rd prize in the 2014 Ruskin Poetry Prize and have been published in Magma, Obsessed with Pipework, Butcher’s Dog, Poems in Which, Poem magazine, Amaryllis and Ink, Sweat & Tears. She is curator of ShortStops (www.shortstops.info), celebrating short story activity across  the UK & Ireland, a Royal Literary Fund fellow at Bristol University and studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Tania is co-author of Writing Short Stories: A Writers’ & Artists’ Companion (Bloomsbury, Dec 2014). www.taniahershman.com

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April, iron (international issue) — Tim Jones

Tim Jones is a poet and author of both literary fiction and science fiction who was awarded the New Zealand Society of Authors Janet Frame Memorial Award for Literature in 2010. He has had three poetry collections, two short story collections and one novel published. His most recent poetry collection, Men Briefly Explained, appeared from IP in 2011. His most recent short story collection is Transported (Vintage, 2008).

Tim has also edited two poetry anthologies. With Mark Pirie, he co-edited the anthology Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand (IP, 2009).Voyagers was included in the NZ Listener‘s “100 Best Books of the Year” list in 2009 and won a Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Collected Work in 2010. His latest book, co-edited with P. S. Cottier, is The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry (IP, 2014).

Tim blogs, less often than he should, at timjonesbooks.blogspot.com, and is an occasional book reviewer for Landfall Review Online and the NZ Herald. He is on Twitter as http://twitter.com/timjonesbooks.

Coming up: award winning writers and editors Kathy Fish and Tania Hershman join us for a special issue of Flash Frontier later in 2015.

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Previous Editors

Sian Williams (Editor, 2012 – 2013). A writer, editor and kiwifruit and orange grower, Sian helped launch Flash Frontier in 2012 and edited here for the first two years, in addition to playing an integral role in the inaugural National Flash Fiction Day. Presently, besides growing beautiful fruit in the north of New Zealand, Sian is currently working on her first novel.

Elizabeth Welsh (Editor, 2014). A a poet, flash writer and academic editor, who is also member of the Tuesday Poem collective and editor of The Typewriter – an online poetry magazine for emerging New Zealand, Australian and Asia-Pacific poets. Originally from the beautiful climes of New Zealand, Elizabeth has been living and working in, and exploring, Europe for the last several years. She wakes up daily with a sense of adventure and loves where travelling is taking her.

Rachel J. Fenton (Features Editor, 2014) is an an award-winning writer and graphic poet. Rachel’s work has been published widely in print and online and short-listed for more prizes than we can name (among them: Dundee International Book Prize; Fish International Poetry Prize; Royal Society of New Zealand Manhire Prize). She blogs here.

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Guest Editors 2014

April, scattered (special NZ issue)

James George joined Flash Frontier in this special issue dedicated to Auckland writer Miles Hughes, who passed away in early 2014. James is a novelist and short story writer of Ngapuhi, English and Irish descent. He is author of Wooden Horses, Hummingbird and Ocean Roads. He has been short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Montana New Zealand Book Awards and the Tasmania Pacific Fiction Prize, and his work appears in the Best of New Zealand Fiction anthologies and Second Violins (stories inspired by lines from Katherine Mansfield). James has taught and mentored in both AUT and University of Auckland’s Master of Creative Writing programmes. He has also served as chair of the Auckland Branch of the NZ Society of Authors (2012-2014) and as chair of Te Ha, the writers’ committee of Toi Maori Aotearoa (2005-2014). More here.

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September, falling