Valiant Scribe
A literary hub giving voice to the voiceless by retelling the human experience

Buffy Aakaash grew up around hills and lakes in New Jersey west of New York City. He has lived as a queer man in both big cities and small remote towns throughout the US. His work has been published in The Poet Magazine, Iris Literary Journal, The Write Launch, Main Street Rag, The Raven’s Perch, Dissonance Magazine, and others. Currently, he lives with his dog, Bodhi, at 7300 feet near the Zuni Mountains of New Mexico, where he works locally doing food distribution and media management for healers and writers.

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Matthew J. Andrews is a private investigator and writer whose poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Orange Blossom Review, Funicular Magazine, and EcoTheo Review, among others. His debut chapbook, I Close My Eyes and I Almost Remember, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. He can be contacted at http://www.matthewjandrews.com/

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Jim Andrukonis is a retired Speech + Drama and Creative Writing teacher from Fairfax County, VA. He currently works part-time doing activities with Brandywine Living in Alexandria as well as substitute teaching at Pinecrest School. As a member of the Northern Virginia Writing Project, he was also co-director of its Young Writers Program for twenty-five years. Along with recently published poems in Valiant Scribe and Nova Bards, Jim has also had several short skits published in Plays Magazine.

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Nancy Brewka-Clark’s fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and drama appear in anthologies published by Red Hen Press, University of Iowa Press, Southeast Missouri State University Press, Harvard College Children’s Stories, YouthPLAYS of Los Angeles, Smith & Kraus, Flame Tree, and Routledge, among others. She is a past winner of the Helen Schaible International Sonnet Competition and the Amy Lowell Poetry Prize. Her debut book of poetry, Beautiful Corpus, was published in March 2020 by Kelsay Books. She lives in Beverly, MA with her husband Tom.

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Susan Christopher is an attorney and nonprofit community leader who is invested in public education and gives her life to finding ways to fight for justice wherever God opens doors. Racial justice has been part of Susan’s call since high school, and she now works tangibly toward justice in her community as a board member of the Racial Solidarity Project and an equity and diversity leader at local public schools. Susan writes Bible studies and runs prayer and care ministries in her local church.

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Angela Costi is also known as Aggeliki Kosti among the Cypriot-Greek diaspora. She resides on the unceded land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. The author of five poetry collections. The most recent is An Embroidery of Old Maps and New (Spinifex Press, 2021). Arts funding from the City of Melbourne is supporting her to complete her poetry manuscript titled The Heart of the Advocate. An excerpt was selected for the 2021 Microflix Writing Awards. Her poem, “Shelter”, was awarded second place in the Meniscus Poetry Award 2020, University of Canberra. She has had writing residencies in Japan, Cyprus, and Greece.

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Chella Courington is a writer and teacher whose poetry and fiction appear in numerous anthologies and journals including Lavender Review, X-R-A-Y Magazine, and New World Writing. With three chapbooks of flash fiction and six of poetry, she recently published a novella-in-flash, Adele and Tom: The Portrait of a Marriage (Breaking Rules Publishing), featured at Vancouver Flash Fiction. A Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and Best New Poet Nominee, Courington was raised in the Appalachian south and now
lives in California.

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Ivan de Monbrison is a poet, novelist, and artist born in 1969 in Paris. He has studied oriental languages in Paris, and then worked for the Picasso Museum, before dedicating himself to his own creativity. He has been published in literary magazines globally. His last poetry book in English and Russian без лица/Faceless has just been released in Canada. He does not believe that his art is of any real significance, he does it as some kind of a tribal ritual, he is fully aware that vanity is one of the worst enemies of most poets and artists, and tries to stay away from it as much as possible. Website: https://sites.google.com/view/ivan-de-monbrison/home

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Babatdor Dkhar is a multi-disciplinary artist. He is the founder of Ka Ktien Media, a media and production entity, and the Chief Editor of Half and One, a platform for written, audio and visual content. He graduated from Oxford University with an MSt in Creative Writing.

Erika Dreifus is the author of Birthright: Poems and Quiet Americans: Stories. A fellow in the Sami Rohr Jewish Literary Institute, she teaches at Baruch College of The City University of New York. Find her online at https://www.erikadreifus.com/

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Christine Du Bois is a cultural anthropologist with books on immigration and race relations, and on how humans use soybeans, including soy agriculture’s human rights and environmental impacts. She’s had poems published at BourgeonOnline.com, the blog of Prospectus magazine, PonderSavant.com, the CAW Anthology, and Pif Magazine. Poems are forthcoming at UniquePoetry.com, in the anthology of the Central Texas Writers Society, and in Psychological Perspectives. She has edited publications on global efforts to reduce violence against women and girls, and she’s a precinct Judge of Elections near Philadelphia.

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Born in Korea and raised in East Africa, Melanie Hyo-In Han is a poet, teacher, and author of Sandpaper Tongue, Parchment Lips. Her poetry has received awards from “Boston in 100 Words” and The Lyric Magazine. Han got her M.F.A. in Poetry and Translation from Emerson College where she taught in the Writing Studies Program and served as an ELL Consultant. She is currently a poetry editor at Flora Fiction. Learn more about her at https://melaniehan.com/

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Stephen House is an award-winning playwright, poet, and actor. He’s won two Awgie Awards (Australian Writer’s Guild), Adelaide Fringe Award, Rhonda Jancovich Poetry Award for Social Justice, Goolwa Poetry Cup, Feast Short Story Prize, and more. He’s received Australia Council literature residencies to Ireland and Canada and an India Asialink. His chapbook ‘real and unreal’ was published by ICOE Press.

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Lee Nash writes poetry and short fiction. Her work has appeared in diverse journals and anthologies, including Magma, Slice, Southword, and The Best Small Fictions 2019. Her first poetry chapbook, Ash Keys, was published by Flutter Press in 2017. She was a 2018 Bath Flash Fiction Award prize winner and joint winner of the 2019 Princemere Poetry Prize; in 2020 she won Fish Publishing’s The Lockdown Prize (haiku and senryu category), the Donn Goodwin Poetry Prize, the TU Dublin Short Story Competition, third prize in the Spirit First Poetry Contest, and was shortlisted for the Bridport prize (flash fiction). Website: https://leenashwriting.com/