Practice Your Pitch!

Kassia has been creating stories her whole life. As a child, her family told her she had an “overactive imagination and she actively fosters it today. After trading the corporate ladder for small-town life, Kassia joined BARN's Writers Studio and it changed her life. She’s had three short stories published in a digital publication, Context Journal. In 2023, she won third place in short story in the annual Pacific Northwest Writers Association contest. She is a member of Sound Writers, hosts weekly writing sessions for the Writers Studio, and serves as a volunteer for several nonprofits including BARN. Kassia has one terrible novel that she will bury in her backyard, one novel that needs serious re-writing, and one good novel that she hopes to finish editing soon. She enjoys sharing the love and support offered by BARN’s writing community.

Emily is a Seattle-based Carolina native and a member of the Pacific Northwest Writers Association (PNWA). She volunteers with BARN's Writer’s Studio and is a founder of Content Hospital, a speculative fiction writers, critique, and marketing collective. Her short story, Everything is Fine, is slated to be published with Crows and Cross Keys in early 2025. Her current work in progress, Treading Water, won in the horror category of the 2024 PNWA Unpublished Novel competition. When she’s not giving her readers nightmares, she’s exploring other fantasy/horror cross-genre ideas, putting the final touches on book one of her dark fantasy trilogy, traveling with her husband, or reading.

Molly is a Puget Sound-based, California-born writer. After earning a bachelors of arts degree in creative writing from San Francisco State, she went on to bartend for several years before meeting her beloved partner and becoming a parent. Experiencing the horrific state of perinatal care in America drew her to birth work and reproductive rights advocacy and then eventually back to writing. She is a member of BARN Writer’s Studio, and an editor for its Annual Collection. She is a founding member of Content Hospital, a rowdy critique group of speculative fiction writers. Her stories are populated by characters that aren’t always heroes, often reckoning with systems of power and control, with echoes of, and reverberations into, our own world. When she is not inviting readers to think acutely about the future of humanity, she is parenting her three children, or throwing a stick for her two dogs.