Our Lightning Pitch Faculty

Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams received a Whiting Writers Award for her novella The Man Who Danced with Dolls and her memoir-in-progress The Following Sea. She has been further supported by a Rona Jaffe National Literary Award and a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship with work appearing in Orion, the Oxford American, StoryQuarterly, The Pinch, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. Abrams currently teaches in the Department of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Born in Calcutta and raised in New Delhi, Sayantani Dasgupta is the author of the upcoming essay collection Brown Women Have Everything. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Idaho. Her essays have been named as “Notable” by Best American Essays 2022 and 2023. Previous books include the short story collection Women Who Misbehave, the chapbook The House of Nails: Memories of a New Delhi Childhood, and Fire Girl: Essays on India, America, & the In-Between, a Finalist for the Foreword Indies Awards for Creative Nonfiction. She has been awarded a Centrum Foundation Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, and the WILMA Woman of the Year award in Arts for 2022. Her writing has appeared in over 60 literary journals and magazines, including, The Rumpus, Scroll, Economic & Political Weekly, IIC Quarterly, Chicago Quarterly Review, and others. She is a contributing editor for Assay: A Journal of Creative Nonfiction and the founder of Write Wilmington, an online writing initiative that’s free and open to writers of all levels and skills all around the world. Her research interests include Creative Nonfiction, Literary Fiction, South Asian History and Literature, Indian Cinema, World Religions, Fairy Tales, Folk Lore and Mythology. An Associate Professor of Creative Writing at UNC Wilmington, Sayantani has also taught writing in India, Italy, Colombia, and Mexico.

Amanda Gawthorpe is the Senior Editor at Blue Ink Press, bringing over a decade of experience in the publishing industry to her role. She is deeply passionate about storytelling and fostering the growth of writers. She champions independent bookstores and libraries, recognizing their crucial role in nurturing literary communities. Outside of work, Amanda’s love for books is evident, with her family often complaining about her book-hoarding tendencies. She holds a BA in English from North Carolina State University and currently resides in Johnston County, NC.

Ginger’s Shoes is Steve Lindahl’s eighth novel. His first three, Motherless Soul , White Horse Regressions, and Hopatcong Vision Quest are historical fiction stories wrapped in modern mysteries. In these books the characters must look into their past life memories to find clues concerning crimes in the present. His fourth, fifth, and sixth books, Under a Warped Cross, Living in a Star’s Light, and Chasing Margie are also historical novels, but without the regression twist. Under a Warped Cross is set in the tenth century, in Scandinavia, Ireland, and Britannia. Living in a Star’s Light follows the life of Lotta Crabtree, a nineteenth century actress who achieved great fame and wealth. Chasing Margie is the story of a missing child and a search that goes on for decades with a DNA twist many year’s later. In his seventh novel, Woodstock to St. Joseph’s, Gregory and his adult daughter, Corinne, are climbing the steps of Saint Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal, praying for a miracle cure for his terminal cancer. While they pray their lives flash by, from the 1969 Woodstock Festival, where Gregory falls in love, to daily life in a Hudson Valley commune. Steve’s short fiction has appeared in Space and Time, The Alaska Quarterly, The Wisconsin Review, Eclipse, Ellipsis and Red Wheelbarrow.

Steve served for five years as an associate editor on the staff of The Crescent Review, a literary magazine he co-founded and he is currently the Managing Editor of Flying South, a literary magazine sponsored by Winston-Salem Writers. He loves to read as much as he loves to write and has posted hundreds of reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, Librarything, and his blog (www.stevelindahl.blogspot.com).

Steve is married to Toni Lindahl, a pastel artist. They currently reside in North Carolina, but still spend time each summer at Lake Hopatcong, NJ. They have two adult children, Nicole and Erik, and one grandchild, Ava.