We are a group of artists and writers creating for artists and writers.

Crystal and Flame Team

Maura Pellettieri | Founding Editor (San Francisco | Jerusalem)

is a writer, editor, and artist. Maura received her MFA in Writing from Washington University in St. Louis. She has collaborated with visual artists, performers, and composers, including Matthew Evan Taylor, Catalina Ouyang, Sarah E. Brook. She has given talks on social practice, collaboration, and public ritual at the Cleveland Institute of Art, the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, Washington University in St. Louis, and other spaces. Her writing can be found in Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, On the Seawall, The Literary Review, Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere. She has spent the past few years teaching creative writing and ancestral repair modalities throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

Emma K. Shibley | Editor (Atlanta)

is an editor, writer, and poet putting down roots in Atlanta, Georgia, where she is a co-founding editor for the collaborative zine Something in the Water. Her writing has appeared on Poets.org and in Rogue Agent, Encyclopædia Britannica, and a few literary magazines in southwest Ohio, where graduated from Miami University’s creative writing program and grew mostly up. She has been a fellow or participant in Writing by Writers’ Tomales Bay workshop, the Los Angeles Review of Books publishing workshop, and the Burnaway Art Writing Incubator, as well as workshops with Douglas Kearney, Lia Purpura, Kaveh Akbar, and others. Emma now works as a technical writer and finds meaning as a musician, but she has alternately been (and hopes to be again) a facilitator, organizer, theatre-maker, and paperboy.

Jason Lai | Divinator (St. Louis)

is an oracular polyglot fascinated by the cultural history of divinatory symbol sets, and the oblique poetry and insight that emerges from ritualized sortilege and interpretation. His deep exploration of divination praxis began during his professional training in traditional East Asian medicine with the I-Ching, The Book of Changes, and has gone on to study astrology, tarot, geomancy, and several other oracle systems. Jason has lived on and off in St. Louis for 17 years, returning for the third time in 2020.

Daniela Molnar | Writer (Portland)

is an artist and writer working in mediums of language, image, paint, pigment, and place. Daniela is also a wilderness guide, educator, and eternal student. A cornerstone of her practice is to be resolutely non-expert and committed to change. Her book CHORUS was selected by Kazim Ali as the winner of Omnidawn’s 1st /2nd Book Prize. Her next book, Light / Remains, is a hybrid work of poetry, essay, and visual art and will be published in 2025. Her visual art focuses on transmuting grief to wonder in order to help shape and nurture generative new questions, feelings, and ethics about what it means to be human at a time of socio-ecological crisis.

Young Rader | Writer (Berlin)

lives and writes in Berlin. His work appears in the Chicago Review, Gulf Coast, New England Review, Little Star, Passages North, swamp pink, and elsewhere. His stories have been shortlisted for the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize and the Berlin Writing Prize. In 2023, he was awarded the Calvino Prize, sponsored by the Creative Writing Program in the English Department of the University of Louisville. He is at work on a novel. 

Matthew Woodward | Writer (New York)

is an artist and writer living in New York City, originally from Rochester, New York. He received his BFA at the School of the Art institute of Chicago and his MFA at the New York Academy of Art. He previously taught at Dominican University and has given lectures at the New York Academy of Art, DePaul University, and others. His work has been shown at Gray Contemporary, Citispire, Studio, The Comfort Station, and Columbia College Chicago, and elsewhere. Woodward has been an artist in residence at The Edward Albee Foundation, Cill Rialiag in Ireland, the Vermont Studio Center, and in 2021 was the Pollock-Krasner Foundation’s Mid-Career Artist in Residence at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His art has been featured in numerous publications, including New American Paintings, the Wall Street Journal, Hyperallergic, Chicago Art Magazine, Bad at Sports, and Art Critical.

and more coming soon!