Meet the people behind Five Points:
Megan Sexton, Editor
Megan Sexton’s collection of poems, Swift Hour, received the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry and was published by Mercer University Press. Her chapbook, Insects & Mystics, was awarded the Redbone Press Prize. Her poetry and nonfiction have been widely published in anthologies and journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, The Literary Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for the PEN/Newman First Amendment Award, Georgia Author of the Year, and has received a fellowship from the Hambidge Center; she is a member of the Mellon Foundation funded Beyond Bars editorial team. She directs the New York Field School and teaches in the Department of English at Georgia State University and drums with the Atlanta-based band, The Skylarks.
Olivia Ivings, Managing Editor
Olivia Ivings (Administrative & Production) earned her M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Florida. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Poet Lore, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Bellevue Literary Review, among others.
Erin Carlyle, Assistant Editor
Erin Carlyle (Poetry, Nonfiction & Flash)) is a poet whose roots are in the American South. Her poetry often explores the connections between poverty, place, and girlhood, and can be found in journals such as Arts and Letters, Tupelo Quarterly, Jet Fuel, and Prairie Schooner. Her debut full-length collection, Magnolia Canopy Otherworld, won the annual Driftwood Press Poetry Manuscript Contest and was published in December of 2020. She has two cats and a new puppy and is currently pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing at Georgia State University.
Eve Clark, Assistant Editor
Eve Clark (Fiction, Nonfiction & Flash ) is an MFA candidate in Fiction. She earned her B.A. in Creative Writing from Agnes Scott College and is originally from Florida. Her work has appeared in Spellbinder Magazine, Sink Hollow Literary Magazine, and the Agnes Scott Writers’ Festival Magazine in 2022 and 2023. She loves old horror movies, fiber arts, queer fantasy and speculative fiction, and her stupid orange cat, Freddie.
Courtney Causey, Assistant Editor
Courtney Causey (Fiction, Nonfiction & Flash) holds an MFA in Fiction from Butler University and is a current Ph.D. Candidate in Fiction at Georgia State University. She loves to write about place, desire and the South. She loves reading about these things too. You can find her most recent work in Bodega Magazine and Joyland Magazine.
Elizabeth Garcia, Assistant Editor
Elizabeth Garcia is the author of Resurrected Body (Cider Press Review, 2024) and Stunt Double (Finishing Line Press, 2016). She received a BA in Humanities from BYU, an MA in English Lit from VSU, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at GSU. She’s a Georgia native, mother of three, and amateur family history buff.
Kelly Kurtzhals, Assistant Editor
Kelly Kurtzhals (Fiction, Nonfiction & Flash)) is a six-time Daytime Emmy-nominated television writer and former standup comedian. She earned her MFA in fiction at Bowling Green State University and is now a PhD student in creative writing fiction at Georgia State, where she writes about robots and aliens when they let her. Her work has appeared in Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, Etherea Magazine, The Arcanist, Dream of Shadows, Flash Fiction Magazine, BULL Lit, and more.
Ian Lindsay, Assistant Editor
Ian Lindsay (Fiction, Nonfiction & Flash ) is a current Ph.D. candidate at Georgia State and holds an MFA from the University of Central Florida. He is a fiction finalist for Solstice’s annual literary contest and The Steven R. Guthrie Memorial Writers’ Festival Contest. As a first-generation Filipino American, he strives to find intersectionality and celebrate culture in writing. Ian also enjoys writing the dark and the strange. His work can be read in Pembroke, Variant Literature, Miracle Monocle, Pinyon and more.
Redd Long, Assistant Editor
A. Riel Regan (Poetry, Nonfiction & Flash)) is a queer, emerging editor and author of poetry and fiction with an intense appreciation for “the human heart in conflict,” as Faulkner said. Their writing often deals with themes of conflict within the self, chronic illness, knowing oneself through nature, and spiritual connections. Their poetry has been featured in Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the Kentucky State Poetry Society’s Pegasus, Impossible Task, and The Curious Nothing. When not writing or reading, they find themselves killing half their houseplants and boldly defending the other half from their cats.
Nathaniel Means, Assistant Editor
Nathaniel Meals is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studies and teaches at Georgia State University where he is a Ph.D. Candidate. His writing appears in The Southeast Review, Rock Salt Journal, Masque & Spectacle, and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Sung-June Park, Assistant Editor
Sung-June Park (Fiction, Nonfiction & Flash ) is a writer-in-progress and perennial tinkerer. When he’s not neurotically obsessing over the perfect placement of words and punctuation marks, he might be found walking his two beloved dogs (whom he considers his life coaches), watching youtube videos about fishing while regretting never having the time to fish, or attempting to fix the same darn scooter that he’s been “fixing” for three years. At the moment his aesthetic concerns revolve around the themes of rejection, materiality and unreality; who knows what he’ll be thinking about in a few months.
Rachel Pitmann, Assistant Editor
Rachel Pittman (Poetry, Nonfiction & Flash)) is a PhD candidate at Georgia State University. She holds an MFA from McNeese State University, where she served as Poetry Editor for the McNeese Review. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Miniskirt Magazine, Whale Road Review, Strange Horizons, and Fairytale Review.
Victoria Pitter, Assistant Editor
Victoria Pitter is a second-year graduate student in the Creative Writing MFA program at Georgia State University. She holds a BA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from GSU. Her fiction primarily focuses on mental illness and its often grotesque physical manifestations in the body. Apart from writing, she enjoys drawing bowls of fruit, crafting metal jewelry, and re-reading the works of Ottessa Moshfegh in her free time.
Merrick Preti, Assistant Editor
Merrick Preti (Fiction, Nonfiction & Flash)) is a VB native who is currently residing in Atlanta while she is attending her PhD program. She is a former collegiate rugby player who now spends her time split between working in digital marketing, reading, and writing fiction
Alicia Raines, Assistant Editor
Joy Alicia Raines is a writer and artist based in Marietta, GA. Raines’ work-in-progress literary fiction novel was named Best Manuscript Sample at the Atlanta Writers Conference by Tobias Literary Agency. Her comics and illustrated poetry have been published by The New York Times, The Offing, Crucial Comix, and 7×7 among others. Raines is a recipient of the 2024 Comics Advocacy Group Mini Grant. Her comic “The Joy of Nail Polish” was nominated for Best of the Net in Victoria
Isaiah Underwood, Assistant Editor
Isaiah Underwood (Poetry, Nonfiction & Flash)) is currently a first year graduate student pursuing a MFA in Creative Writing. His work has appeared in Maximum Tilt and Sphere Magazine. He is a native of Cleveland, Ohio and has experienced both the trauma and triumph of the Cleveland Browns, Cavaliers, and (now) the Guardians. When he is not writing or editing, he enjoys dabbling in graffiti drawing on canvas, sketching, singing, and recording music in the studio. His favorite genres are pop, hip-hop, indie rock, R&B, and alternative.