meet the staff.
Jennifer Messing
Editor in Chief and Contributing Writer
Jennifer is an editor, writer, poet, and German-English translator from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her passion for academia stems from the interconnection between her many studies, her inherent love of reading, and culminated in the founding of The California Journal of Women Writers in September 2012. Her work has appeared in The New Union, Pomona Valley Review, Haiku Journal, the UC Berkeley Comparative Literature Undergraduate Journal and is forthcoming in various other capacities. Her research has been presented, or is forthcoming, in a published collection on Jane Austen, and at conferences by PAMLA and CSULA. She has a BA in English, with an emphasis in Women’s Studies, and MA in Liberal Arts & Sciences, with emphases in Literature, Ethnic and Women’s Studies, and Media and Popular Culture. You can also find her at www.jennifermessing.com
Cara Mac Neil
Contributing Writer
Cara Mac Neil is an MA student at The College of New Jersey studying gender in Shakespeare and film adaptation. She is currently working on her Master’s Thesis involving The Hollow Crown series. She is a full-time high school teacher, a part-time wedding photographer, has a mild addiction to the Food Network, and loves to be curled up beside her boyfriend and their dog with a roaring fire. Her theoretical influences are Mulvey, Butler and Althusser with dashes of Freud. She is fascinated with integrating popular film and graphic novels into the literary dialogue. She also harbors secret aspirations of becoming Batman one day.
Karen Lively
Contributing Writer
Karen studied Comparative Literature at UCLA. Her focus was on English and Spanish language texts but she loves literature from all around the world. She currently lives in her native Connecticut where she is braving the cold and the postgraduate job search. She enjoys being near the sea, walking her two dogs, and watching horror films.
Stacey Balkun
Contributing Writer
Stacey Balkun, author of Lost City Museum (ELJ Publications, 2016), earned her MFA in Creative Writing at Fresno State before moving to New Orleans. A 2015 Hambidge Fellow, Stacey served as Artist-in-Residence at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Her work has appeared in Gargoyle, Muzzle, THRUSH, and Bayou, among others.
Photography credit: Karl Ault
Jen Teeter-Moore
Contributing Writer
Jennifer Teeter-Moore is a writer and a graduate from the University of California, Irvine. She is currently spending her time wandering bookstores around the world while she does freelance work. She has worked at a horse stable in Angoulême, France, a llama farm in Neuötting, Germany, a hostel in Oban, Scotland, and a kiwi pack house in Tauranga, New Zealand. She has a passion for making the world better by promoting compelling literature. She enjoys reading, editing, reviewing and writing and is very excited to be working for TCJWW.
Catherine Ruiz
Contributing Writer
Catherine Ruiz is a feminist writer from Southern California currently living in Nebraska. She is a Journalism and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies graduate from California State University Long Beach as well as part of the United States Army. Catherine is a very passionate, goal oriented individual who is always looking for ways to help others reach their full potential. She loves spending time with loved ones, animals, reading, writing, horror and comedy movies, exploring new places, museums, and anything to do with cats. She loves cats. Catherine hopes to empower and instill the love of reading and writing to future generations as she continues to venture through life.
Marina Blitshteyn
Contributing Writer
Marina Blitshteyn is a Soviet-born poet and writer. She is the author of 4 published or forthcoming chapbooks: Russian for Lovers, Nothing Personal, $kill$, and Kaddish. Her work can be found in the &NOW Awards 3 Anthology, Apogee Journal, Emergency Index, 1913, Two Serious Ladies, Berkeley Poetry Review, CutBank, and elsewhere. She works as an adjunct instructor of composition and literature.
Nidia Flores
Contributing Writer
Andrea Dickens
Contributing Writer
Andrea Janelle Dickens is a native of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia and currently lives in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, where she lives and writes; she is also a desert gardener and a functional ceramic artist. She teaches in the Writing Programs at Arizona State and volunteers at the Desert Botanical Garden and Mesa Arts Center. Some of her recent work has appeared in Rivet, of zoos, streetcake, New South, Found Poetry Review, and Thin Air. Her work as a writer and an artist is particularly interested in domestic space, women's worlds, and feminist communities.
Nidia Kimberly Flores is a recent graduate from UC Irvine, with a degree in English, Theater, and a minor in Education. She feels very fortunate to have studied the subjects she is most passionate about—subjects that somehow all fit together. Besides reading and writing, Nidia helps stage manage many theatrical shows, a creative and technical process that allows her to work closely with many types of literature. In her free time, she enjoys pizza and traditional Salvadorian food with her family and friends.