The ARB Editorial Collective
Jake Casella Brookins, editor and publisher
Jake Casella Brookins (he/him) is an SF reviewer and independent scholar, regularly writing for the Chicago Review of Books and Locus Magazine, and presenting at ICFA, the SFRA, and more. Originally from the Pennsylvania Appalachians, Casella now lives in Buffalo. You can find links to his reviews, blog, and social media on Linktree.
Commission interests: science fiction & fantasy literature; science fiction and philosophy (especially ethics); genre theory and structure, and works that challenge or blur genres; reading communities and reception theory.
Zachary Gillan, editor
Zachary Gillan (he/him) is a critic and independent scholar residing in Durham, North Carolina. In a former life he was a historian focused on radical social movements and late capitalism in the United State. His current reading and research tends to focus on the weird, both in its traditional form of the weird tale and in the New Weird’s reverberating effects on modern speculative fiction, with a particular interest in urban spaces and emancipatory politics. He blogs infrequently at https://doomsdayer.wordpress.com/ and tweets somewhat more frequently at @robop_style.
Misha Grifka Wander, editor
Misha Grifka Wander (he/they) is a PhD candidate in the Ohio State University English department. Their major fields are video game studies, comics studies, and speculative fiction studies, using a ecocritical and queer lens. Other publications include an essay on sexism in speculative fiction genre divides (The New Americanist, Fall 2019), ecology in Skyrim (Being Dragonborn, 2021), and a forthcoming chapter on pronoun use in contemporary science fiction (The Routledge Companion Gender in Science Fiction). They also work creatively through comics, poetry, and prose. Previous creative publications can be found in 614Now and Apricity Magazine. You can find them on Twitter @MishaGrifka.
Commission interests: climate change, especially with regards to utopian or optimistic writing that still takes into account the realities of anthropogenic climate change, queer stories and monstrosity, writing about and by people of color, non-Anglophone writers and stories, and narratives of resistance to empire.
Chad A. Hines, copy editor
Chad A. Hines (he/him) has a PhD from the University of Iowa, and has taught English in Romania, China, France, Peru, and Mexico. He has worked as a technical writer, editor, video game developer, online game master and coding guide. Interested in ecological restoration, speculative fiction, and green technology, he writes about books, crypto currencies, and open source software. Currently, he is living in Kansas and working on a non-fiction book called Improvised Learning: Games and Stories, which is a collection of creative techniques he found useful in language learning, as well as personal essays about teaching English using an improvisational approach.
Lillian Liao, editor
Lillian Liao (she/her) studies, lives, and works (in no particular order) on the Canadian west coast. Her past academic work involved researching narrative theory, literature as testimony, and more generally, poetics. Aside from those topics, she is currently interested in exploring speculative eco-literature.
Adam McLain, editor
Adam McLain is a 2021-2022 Harvard Frank Knox Traveling Fellow. He has a master of theological studies, emphasizing in women, gender, sexuality, and religion, from Harvard University and a BA in English, editing, and women’s studies from Brigham Young University. His current research interests center on dystopian literature and sexual justice, but he dabbles in Mormonism, queer theory, and medievalism.
Arina Nabais, copyeditor
Arina (she/her) is a lover of the uncommon and an avid reader turned book reviewer, nesting at Queen’s Book Asylum. Long entranced by the art of storytelling, she eagerly devours its every form, finding herself most at home within the vast worlds of speculative fiction. When not championing indie and inclusive SFF, Arina is a developer who enjoys gaming, playing around with 3D modeling, and conversations that go far into the night.
Alex Skopic, copyeditor
Alex Skopic (he/him) is a freelance writer, editor, and substitute teacher from Springville, Pennsylvania. An incorrigible scribbler, he graduated from the University of Reading, England in late 2021, where he wrote his MA dissertation on the cultural afterlives of William Blake. Ever since, he has been inflicting essays and literary criticism on an unsuspecting world. His work can be found in Protean Magazine, Vastarien: A Literary Journal, and the Cleveland Review of Books, among other places.
Daniel Stephensen, editor
Originally from Australia, Dan Stephensen now lives in the mountains of New Mexico with his wife Erin and their fur family. In his day job he works for an esteemed genre fiction editor. Dan is an advocate for interpretative, analytical and critical writing on speculative fiction of any kind, in any language.
Commission interests: actively seeking thought-provoking critical articles written for the well-read and curious general reader, especially articles that bring in concepts or perspectives from continental philosophy, history, indigneous studies, feminist studies, history of medicine, LGBTQ+ studies or cultural studies.
Cynthia Zhang, editor
Cynthia Zhang (she/they) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Broadly speaking, their current research investigates why, in founding texts of science fiction studies, there is a tendency to elevate sci-fi at the expense of fantasy. Without drawing a rigid line between sci-fi and fantasy, her work asks what possibilities are opened up when fiction engages with magic rather than science as the primary speculative element. She also writes creatively, and her debut novel, After the Dragons, was a finalist for the 2022 Ursula K LeGuin Award in Fiction. They can be found online at @cz_writes on Twitter.
Commission interests: climate change, metafiction, fandom/transformative works, queerness, psychoanalysis, media theory.
Editors Emeriti
Sean Guynes, editor and publisher
Amandine Faucheux, editor
Laura Collier, editor
Sabrina Mittermeier, editor
Summer van Houten, editor
Ashley Domingo Hendricks, editor
Ashumi Shah, editor
Ancillary Review of Books 