Dear Audience,

This issue marks our one year anniversary, bringing us the highest volume of submissions we’ve received since our launch. It’s been a year of evolving, learning, milestones, with plenty of reasons to celebrate our growing and thriving community and platform. So, I want to take a second to thank you all for coming along on this magic carpet ride.

I posed many questions for the Secrets & Lies theme, named after the 1996 movie, when I put out the open call, and was privileged to receive and review submissions with answers from female voices from all over the world, including Egypt, Taiwan, England, Germany, Turkey, Dominican Republic, Lithuania, Canada, Poland, and even from beyond the grave (literally), through visual and performance art, poetry, and fiction. It was an honor to curate this ethereal beauty of a volume as well as pair the words with art. I would like to thank everyone involved in helping me select the works for this volume- Volume 4’s jury- with each juror focusing primarily on one category, although it’s important to mention that we looked at all the categories collectively and had conversations about each individual piece, as well as how everything worked as whole. Our jury for Volume 4 includes Alex Graffeo (fiction), Hilary Davies (poetry), KRISTINE ESSER SLENTZ (poetry), Kim Gittens (fiction), and Neda Zahraie (fiction/media). I’d also like to credit Arizona Smith for once again creating an awesome illustration used as the banner, conveying the mood of this volume’s theme.

If you love what you’ve experienced and wish to show your appreciation for all the hard work and help us cover the costs that have gone into creating this volume, including time spent reviewing hundreds of submissions, which we keep free of cost, the cost of operations, and some paid subcontractors like our IT witch, then please show us your support! We’re a primarily volunteer-run operation (although we’d like to change that) and a passion project made up of professionals. Every aspect of these volumes, which we would like to continue producing, is a labor of love.

Enjoy,

Amarantha da Cruz

Editor-in-Chief