Joel Bisaillon of Umbra Ludus (shadow play) focuses on illustrating dark, dramatic, bold, and colourful imagery with a flair for the fantastical. With years of tabletop gaming and delving into Hitchcock, Baum, and Lovecraft at an early age, he led his creative focus towards the dark fantasy, cosmic and American gothic horror genres.

His art has graced the pages of Aurealis Science Fiction & Fantasy Magazine, BYU’s Leading Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine, New Myths E-Zine, Electric Spec Magazine, Expanded Horizons Speculative Fiction Magazine, Hyphenpunk, Penumbric Speculative Fiction Magazine, and The British Fantasy Society's Horizons Magazine. As well as several renowned roleplaying, tabletop gaming, and publishing companies, including New Comet Games, Vermin Games, Blasphemy Press, Jester’s Hand Publishing, Kelestia Games, Lostlorn Games, and Legendary Games.

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A 2015 Nebula finalist, Beth Cato is the author of the cozy mystery Cheddar Luck Next Time as well as fantasy-like A Thousand Recipes for Revenge. She’s a Hanford, California native now moored in Red Wing, Minnesota. She usually has one or two cats in close orbit. Find out more at BethCato.com; follow her on BlueSky at @BethCato and Instagram at @catocatsandcheese.


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Muze (N. Chu) is Co-Chief-in-Editor of the Portland Review and a grad student at Portland State University. When not writing, they enjoy cooking, flailing around on the bass, and practicing Japanese. They have words at Space Wizard Press, Zoetic Press, and the House of Long Shadows. You can find them on Bluesky @muzetrigger.bsky.social where they post the fantasy flash series #DiaryOfNana.

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Shy and nocturnal, Jennifer Crow has rarely been photographed in the wild, but it’s rumored she lives near a waterfall in western New York. In the past quarter-century, her work has appeared in many print and electronic venues, including Uncanny, Analog, and anthologies like Along Harrowed Trails and Under Her Skin. A Rhysling Award winner in 2023 for her poem “Harold and the Blood-Red Crayon,” she will have work in upcoming issues of Kaleidotrope and Asimov’s Science Fiction as well as her poem in Penumbric. Those who’d like to know more about her writing can catch up with her on Bluesky: @writerjencrow.bsky.social.

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Deborah L. Davitt was raised in Nevada, but currently lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and son. Her award-winning poetry and prose have appeared in over seventy journals, including F&SF, Asimov’s, Analog, and Lightspeed. For more about her work, including her poetry collections, The Gates of Never, Bounded by Eternity, From Voyages Unreturning, Xenoforming, and To Love Unquietly, please see www.deborahldavitt.com.

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Viviana De Cecco is a writer, translator, and visual artist. She works as a content writer for Tint Journal. She was the second-place winner of Sunlight Press Magazine’s 2024 Photography Contest. Her visual art and photography appeared in Zoetic Press, Newrosis, Spellbinder Magazine, Pink Hydra, among others. Her fiction and translations have also appeared in various liteerary and speculative magazines, including The Seize Press, Grim&Gilded, Dark Holme Publishing, Poets' Choice, Azonal Translation, among others. Her work can be found at: https://vivianadececco.altervista.org/

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Cecil Fenn is a writer and transmedia designer. Originally based in New York City, he worked in music studios, theatres, and funeral homes across North America and Europe before settling his creative practice in the UK. Cecil's fiction has been shortlisted for the WEM Aurora Prize and has appeared in The Dread Machine, Gavagai, The Colored Lens, and other literary journals. His debut novel The Restorative Artist will be published by Lucent Dreaming in September 2026. You can find more of his work at cecilfenn.com or follow him @cecilfenn.

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Jess Gofton (she/her) is a British northerner originally from Middlesbrough who writes speculative fiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in Gwyllion Magazine, Flame Tree Press’s Shadows on the Water anthology, and Shacklebound Books’ Wyrms 2: An Anthology of Dragon Drabbles, and Haven Spec Magazine.

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S. L. Johnson is a 2025 Aurealis Award finalist whose speculative fiction and poetry appear in Analog, Andromeda Spaceways, The Colored Lens, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Wayward Wormhole Workshop and a former editor at Novel Slices, she is originally from the US and now lives in Sydney, Australia. Find her on Instagram @stephaniejohnsonpoetry and Bluesky at @sljohnson.bsky.social.

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Alyce Lomax’s fiction has appeared in multiple issues of Gargoyle, as well as Maudlin House, Dark Horses: The Magazine of Weird Fiction, Coffin Bell Journal, The MacGuffin, Pindeldyboz, and many others. Coffin Bell Journal nominated her short story, "A Good Night in the Neighborhood," for the Pushcart Prize in 2022. She currently has a short story in Gargoyle Online #13, as well as pieces upcoming in 34 Orchard and Macabre Magazine. She lives in Alexandria, Va. with her husband and two cats.

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Lyra Meurer is a sentient muscle spasm with a restless hunger for writing. They live in Colorado with their husband, pet rats, and ever-growing stacks of journals and books. They have short fiction published in Heartlines Spec, Tree & Stone, Cosmic Horror Monthly and several anthologies.

Lyra's contemplations on Taco Bell soothsaying, early 2000s television, worldbuilding, and other bizarre phenomena, along with pictures of their doodles, can be found at https://lyrameurer.blogspot.com/.

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James Edward O'Brien grew up in North Jersey in the US and currently resides in Queens, NY. His short fiction and poetry have been featured in The Deadlands, Spunk: Art & Perspectives, and Metastellar, among others. This is Jim's second appearance in Penumbric. You can keep tabs on Jim via Instagram @unagi_yojimbo.

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Anthony Panegyres is a Perth writer of novelettes and short stories, who enjoys both privileging nature and utilising meta-elements within his fiction. His works have appeared in both premier Australian literature journals, such as Overland 204 (an Aurealis Award Finalist story), Overland 214, and Meanjin Quarterly, and also internationally acclaimed 'weird lit' homes, such as Bourbon Penn 25 (highlighted by Ellen Datlow in her Year's Best intro and on her Recommended Reading List) and Bourbon Penn 31 (also an Aurealis Award Finalist story). Some of his other story homes include the anthologies The Best Australian Stories, The Year's Best Australian Fantasy & Horror Vol. 2 & 6, and the award-winning Bloodlines, and At the Edge. A novelette of Panegyres’ was recently written about in The Conversation, and The Times, as one of five Australian literary works of particular relevance to the national conversation about AI.

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Brian Malachy Quinn uses watercolors, pen and ink, digital media, block prints, and etchings. As an artist he has won 23 international juried awards in last 26 months and sold 45 illustrations to date. He has always created art since early childhood. His style can be surreal for speculative fiction or literary fiction, or realistic for his fallback of lion paintings. He is compelled to create art and does so every day and finds it as a way to put aside his worries and stresses and produce "good brain chemicals".

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Reema Rajbanshi is the author of Sugar, Smoke, Song (Red Hen Press, 2020), a novel-in-stories exploring the lives of young women and immigrants in the U.S. She is also a literary scholar, currently completing a monograph on caste, and a nonfiction writer, working on an experimental travel memoir. Her most recent essay is the zuihitsu “The Dining Room or Jokes We Tell” in Nat. Brut. Born in Miami to parents from Assam, Rajbanshi grew up in the Bronx, then worked for a decade in California. Samples of her publications and readings may be found at https://linktr.ee/reemarajbanshi. “Sirens” is an excerpt from her climate novel manuscript.

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Kasia Runté is in her third year at the University of Lethbridge in the Indigenous Health program. She loves art, but resists making it her career because she not interested in compromising her art to be commercial. Instead, she wants art to be the passion that keeps her balanced at the end of the workday in a field such as palliative care. She is often drawn to darker themes and images, partly as a form of catharsis, and partly to balance her super-cheerful pieces.

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Carl Scharwath has appeared globally with 180+ journals selecting his writing or art. Carl has published four poetry books and his latest book is The World Went Dark, published by Alien Buddha Press. Carl has four photography books, published with Praxis and CreatiVingenuitiy. His photography was exhibited in the Mount Dora and Leesburg Centers for the Arts. Carl is currently an art editor at Glitterati and former editor for Minute Magazine. He was nominated for four The Best of the Net Awards (2022-25) and two different 2023 Pushcart Nominations for poetry and a short story.

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Hibah Shabkhez is a writer and photographer from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Harpur Palate, Stirring, Forevermore, Empyrean Literary Magazine, Good River Review, and a number of other literary magazines. Studying life, languages, and literature from a comparative perspective across linguistic and cultural boundaries holds a particular fascination for her.

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/HibahShabkhez

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Gabriel Shestack is a writer from Koreatown, Los Angeles. He majored in Political Economy and works as a Set Dresser in Film. This is his first published story.



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Marge Simon lives in Ocala, FL. Her works have appeared in Pedestal Magazine, Asimov’s, The Magazine of F and SF, Crannog, Silver Blade, New Myths, Daily Science Fiction, Penumbric. She attends the ICFA annually as a guest poet/writer. A multiple Bram Stoker award winner, Marge is the second woman to be acknowledged by the SF &F Poetry Association with a Grand Master Award and has won the Elgin, Dwarf Stars and Rhysling in both categories. She also received the HWA Lifetime Achievement award in 2021. MargeSimonWrites@instagram.com

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Katherine Souza is an illustrator, writer, and game designer living in Maine. Born and raised in the South, she made the slow crawl north until she got as far as she could. While not crafting worlds and stories, she is pestering her three pet gerbils. Her work can be found in Cold Signal magazine, Hellarkey vol. IV, and dogyard mag.

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Gordon Sun is a surgeon exploring the interstitial spaces within healthcare, science, and technology. His stories have appeared in If There’s Anyone Left, Daily Science Fiction, The Dread Machine, NewMyths.com, Permanent Flux, Solstitia, After Dinner Conversation, TOWER, The Lorelei Signal, Penumbric, Daikaijuzine, the Starship Blunder 2: Starship Wonder and Consumed anthologies, and other publications.

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Irina Tall (Novikova) is an artist, graphic artist, illustrator. She graduated from the State Academy of Slavic Cultures with a degree in art, and also has a bachelor's degree in design.

The first personal exhibition "My soul is like a wild hawk" (2002) was held in the museum of Maxim Bagdanovich. In her works, she raises themes of ecology, in 2005 she devoted a series of works to the Chernobyl disaster, draws on anti-war topics. The first big series she drew was The Red Book, dedicated to rare and endangered species of animals and birds. Writes fairy tales and poems, illustrates short stories. She draws various fantastic creatures: unicorns, animals with human faces, she especially likes the image of a man - a bird - Siren. In 2020, she took part in Poznań Art Week. Her work has been published in magazines: Gupsophila, Harpy Hybrid Review, Little Literary Living Room and others. In 2022, her short story was included in the collection The 50 Best Short Stories, and her poem was published in the collection of poetry The wonders of winter.

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Jennifer Weigel is a multi-disciplinary mixed media conceptual artist. Weigel utilizes a wide range of media to convey her ideas, including assemblage, drawing, fibers, installation, jewelry, painting, performance, photography, sculpture, video and writing. Much of her work touches on themes of beauty, identity (especially gender identity), memory & forgetting, and institutional critique. Weigel’s art has been exhibited nationally in all 50 states and has won numerous awards. https://jenniferweigelart.com/

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Abby Nicole Yee is a Filipino neurodivergent writer of speculative fiction. Her work has appeared in Clarkesworld and The Philippines Graphic. Find her online on her website (abbynicoleyee.com).

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Z. Xzyruz has one goal: To bring you to a place beyond pain and nostalgia where dreams and reality are one. Wormheart is one of their many methods to this madness.

Learn more about Wormheart at: https://www.metal-archives.com/bands/wormheart/3540411921