Each of our contributors passionately specialize in environmental, social justice and sustainability, and have worked hard for years to build hope for the future.
Karen Romero is a Los Angeles based researcher, journalist, and writer. Her writing and reporting has covered topics related to film, politics, art, and culture. Her research explores intersections of race, gender, and class in American Politics. She is currently a Political Science and International Relations Ph.D. student at the University of Southern California.
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Jeremy Rosenberg has written, “How To Imagine A Better Place,” “The Long Revolution,” “Is The West Still the Best?” “Midnight in America?” and “Social Security for Everyone” for Red Canary Magazine. Rosenberg is a Los Angeles-based writer and communications strategist. His words here are his own. His work has appeared in dozens of print and online newspapers, magazines, anthologies and books including: No Man Is An Island with TiGeorges Laguerre; Kick-Off Concussion with Anthony Davis; and Under Spring, Voices + Art + Los Angeles . He has served as an assistant dean at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, a VP at the LA84 Foundation, and a staff member at LATimes.com.
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Nicholas Schou is the former Editor in Chief of OC Weekly and an investigative reporter whose work has led to the release from prison of wrongfully convicted individuals as well as the indictment and imprisonment of a Huntington Beach Mayor. Schou's work has appeared in numerous publications including, The Atlantic, Newsweek, Salon, and the Los Angeles Times. He is also the author of several books including Kill the Messenger, which was made into a 2014 Hollywood film starring Jeremy Renner, and Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and its Quest to Spread Peace, Love and Acid to the World.
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Ivan Serna’s environmental activism focuses on bringing awareness to urban oil drilling in Los Angeles and the harm it poses to the community. Serna hopes to start a nonprofit organization focused on youth activism, driven by his belief that young people can create meaningful impact. Currently, he is a member of STAND LA, One Up Action and the Los Angeles Mayor's Youth Council for Climate Action.
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Maurya Simon’s tenth volume of poems, The Wilderness: New and Selected Poems, was awarded the 2019 Gold Medal in Poetry from the Independent Booksellers Association. Other awards include: a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship (Bangalore, South India), an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and the Lucille Medwick Memorial and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards from the Poetry Society of America. She’s been a Visiting Writer at the American Academy in Rome, the Baltic Centre for Writers & Translators (Sweden), Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), and at the MacDowell Colony. Simon’s poems have been translated into Hebrew, French, Spanish, Greek, and Farsi. She currently serves as a Professor of the Graduate Division at the University of California, Riverside and resides in the Angeles National Forest in southern California.
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Bob Sipchen spent much of his journalism career at the Los Angeles Times, where he served as a reporter, columnist and Sunday Opinion Editor and won, with Alex Raksin, a Pulitzer for editorial writing, shared in the paper’s Pulitzer for its team coverage of the Los Angeles riots and shared, as an editor, in the 2014 Pulitzer for coverage of the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, California. He was Editor in Chief of Sierra Magazine and communications director for the Sierra Club, America’s oldest, largest and most effective grassroots environmental organization. He teaches journalism and communications in the Writing and Rhetoric Department at Occidental College in Los Angeles, and is the author of a non-fiction book on Southern California street gangs, Baby Insane and the Buddha, which the New York Times Book Review called, “a lucid, cinematic read.” He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Pam and has three grown children. He is working on a novel about a hapless cognitive scientist drawn into a femme fatale's risky quest, and on a memoir about growing up in a small residence on the grounds of a California State mental institution where his psychiatrist aunt took in and housed over a dozen members of her sprawling, hugely dysfuctional extended family.
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Sam Slovick is an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker who has been published in the LA Times, Los Angeles Magazine, LA Weekly, LA Yoga Magazine, Mission & State, GOOD, Interview, Huffington Post and many others. His feature documentary release, Radicalized (2016) has been called the definitive voice-of-a-generation millennial protest film. As a journalist, his ability to access subjects and deliver deep narrative stories with video and photography are his signature. His original series, On Skid Row (Reason Pictures) and Scenes From The New Revolution (Participant Media).
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Born and raised in Southern California, Jayson Smith is a junior at Whittier College and an amateur writer.
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Ingrid L. Taylor is a poet, essayist, and veterinarian whose work has most recently appeared in the Southwest Review, Ocotillo Review, Collateral Journal, and others. She has received Punt Volat Journal’s Annual Poetry Award and is a Pushcart nominee. Her nonfiction has appeared in HuffPost, Sentient Media, and Feminist Food Journal. She has been awarded support for her writing from the Playa Artist Residency, the Horror Writers Association, and Gemini Ink. She is currently completing her first poetry collection, An Alchemy of Sparrows. Find out more about her work at ingridltaylorwrites.com.
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Lisa Teasley is the author of the acclaimed novels Dive and Heat Signature, and the award-winning story collection, Glow in the Dark, published by Bloomsbury. Teasley’s new story collection Fluid pubs in September 2023 on Cune Press. Lisa’s essays, stories and poems have been much anthologized, appearing in publications and media such as National Public Radio, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Parabola, Los Angeles Review of Books, Kweli Journal, Alta Journal, Joyland and Zyzzyva.
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We publish deeply reported journalism focusing on environmental, sustainability and social justice issues. Our goal is to bring you difference-making work that provokes discussions, inspires reflection and speaks to the times with stories that prove timeless.
PUBLISHER
Tracy McCartney
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Joe Donnelly
MANAGING EDITOR
Tori O’Campo
CONTENT CREATOR
Sam Slovick
ART DIRECTOR
Nancy Hope
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Erin Aubry Kaplan
Karen Romero
Tony Barnstone
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Tanner Sherlock