Advisory Board - Flash Fiction Institute

The Flash Fiction Institute depends on the wisdom of flash masters to guide us in all matters. When it comes to the art of brevity, we appreciate hearing many voices.

Tara Campbell

Tara Campbell is an award-winning writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, fiction co-editor at Barrelhouse, and graduate of American University’s MFA in Creative Writing. Publication credits include Masters Review, Wigleaf, Electric Literature, CRAFT Literary, Uncharted Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Escape Pod/Artemis Rising. She’s the author of the eco sci-fi novel TreeVolution, two hybrid collections of poetry and prose, and two short story collections from feminist sci-fi publisher Aqueduct Press. Her sixth book, City of Dancing Gargoyles, was released by Santa Fe Writers Project (SFWP) in September 2024. She teaches creative writing at venues such as Johns Hopkins University, Clarion West, The Writer’s Center, and Hugo House. Find her at www.taracampbell.com

Kathy Fish

Kathy Fish’s stories have been widely published in journals, anthologies, and textbooks. Her work has been published in Ploughshares, Guernica, Swamp Pink, Electric Literature, Denver Quarterly, Best American Nonrequired Reading, the Norton Reader, and Norton’s Flash Fiction America. Honors include the Copper Nickel Editor’s Prize, six appearances in the Best Small Fictions series, and a Ragdale Foundation Fellowship. Additionally, she was recently awarded a writer’s residency through the Kerouac Project in Orlando, Florida. The author of five short fiction collections, Fish teaches a variety of writing workshops online. She also publishes a popular monthly craft newsletter, The Art of Flash Fiction, which was recently named as one of the 20 Best Creative Writing Substacks by Writers at Work.

Jeff Friedman

Jeff Friedman’s eleventh book, Broken Signals was published by Bamboo Dart Press in August 2024. Friedman’s mini stories and prose poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Smokelong Quarterly, New England Review, Flash Fiction Funny, Flash Nonfiction Funny, Hotel Amerika, Wigleaf, 100-Word Story, Best Microfiction 2021 2022, 2023, and 2024, and The New Republic. He has received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship, and numerous other awards. He has taught creative writing courses at the University of Missouri MFA, University of Iowa, Washington University Summer Program, the Writing Program at Keene State College and was a core faculty member at the NEC Low-Residency MFA Program.

Darien Hsu Gee

Darien Hsu Gee is the author of five novels published by Penguin Random House that have been translated into eleven languages. She received a Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship for Other Small Histories and a Hawaiʻi Book Publishers’ Ka Palapala Poʻokela Award of Excellence for Writing the Hawaiʻi Memoir. Her anthology, Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World, received a Silver IPPY award and her collection of micro essays, Allegiance, received a Bronze IPPY award. Darien’s next book, Fortune Cookie (Object Lessons series), will be published by Bloomsbury in 2026.

Darien’s Substack, Writer-ish, focuses on the art of micro prose. She currently serves on the board of Short Reads and lives in Hawaiʻi.

Tara Lynn Masih

Tara Lynn Masih is editor of the acclaimed Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction and Founding Series Editor of The Best Small Fictions. She’s been heavily anthologized in such collections as Brevity & Echo, Flashed: Sudden Stories in Comics and Prose, Nothing Short of 100, and W.W. Norton’s New Micro. Her flash, featured in Fiction Writer’s Review for National Short Story Month, has received Wigleaf Top 50 recognition. A National Jewish Book Award Finalist for her novel My Real Name Is Hanna, Tara’s recent story collection, How We Disappear, received a Florida Book Award. www.TaraMasih.com

Pamela Painter

Pamela Painter is the award-winning author of five story collections and co-author of the widely-used textbook, What If? Her stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Atlantic, FlashBoulevard, Harper’s, Michigan Quarterly Review, 100WordStory, Ploughshares and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others and in numerous anthologies, such as Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction, MicroFiction, New Micro and Flash Fiction America. She has won four Pushcart Prizes and Agni Review’s John Cheever Award for Fiction. Painter’s stories have been presented on National Public Radio, and on stage in LA, London and New York by Word Theatre. Her stories also appear on the YouTube channel CRONOGEO. Painter is a Founding Donor of the Flash Fiction Archive, at the Harry Ransom Center, Univ. of Texas, Austin, established in 2020.

Meg Pokrass

Meg Pokrass is the author of eight flash fiction collections, two award-winning collections of hybrid prose, and two novellas-in-flash.

Her books include Damn Sure Right (Press 53, 2011), The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down (Etruscan Press, 2015), My Very End of the Universe: Five Novellas in Flash and a Study of the Form (Rose Metal Press, 2015), Alligators At Night (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2018), Triple #12 (Ravenna Press, 2019), Alice In Wonderland Syndrome (V. Press, 2020), The Dog Seated Next to Me (Pelekinesis, 2020), The Loss Detector, a novella-in-flash (Bamboo Dart Press, 2021), Spinning to Mars (Blue Light Press, 2021), and co-author of The House of Grana Padano, with Jeff Friedman (Pelekinesis Press, 2022), Disappearing Debutantes (with Aimee Parkison, Finalist for the Big Other Book Award for Fiction), Breath and Shadow: Six Sentence Stories (with Robert Scotellaro, from MadHat Press) and The First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories (forthcoming from Dzanc Books in September 2024).

Meg is the Co-Founder of Flash Fiction Festival UK, Co-Founder of The Flash Fiction Collective Reading Series (San Francisco), Founding Editor of New Flash Fiction Review and the Founding Series Co-Editor of the Best Microfiction Anthology Series, Festival Curator for Flash Fiction Festival, U.K., and Columnist (Flash Challenge Judge and creator) at Mslexia Magazine and serves as Chief Judge for the Edinburgh Award for Flash Fiction and the Scottish Arts Trust’s new True Flash Award.

Josh Tyree

J. M. Tyree is the coauthor of the flash fiction collection Our Secret Life in the Movies (with Michael McGriff, an NPR Best Books selection) and BFI Film Classics: The Big Lebowski (with Ben Walters).

His short stories and flash fictions have appeared in American Short Fiction, ergot, Esquire.com, and New England Review. His most recent book is the cine-novella The Haunted Screen.

Tyree serves as the editor-in-chief of Film Quarterly and as an associate professor in the Cinema Program at VCUarts.

Ran Walker

Ran Walker (he/him) is the author of over 40 books. His short stories, flash fiction, microfiction, and poetry have appeared in a variety of anthologies and journals.

He is the winner of the Indie Author Project’s National Indie Author of the Year Award, the Black Caucus of the American Library Association Best Fiction Ebook Award, the Virginia Indie Author Project Award for Adult Fiction, and the Blind Corner Afrofuturism Microfiction Contest.

Ran is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Hampton University and teaches with Writer’s Digest University. He lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter.