Welcome! to The Reflection issue Litro#158.

Litro's mission is to find the best and most exciting new voices in fiction and non-fiction and give them a platform for their work.

Featuring writers to watch: Jeanne Panfely is a fiction writer from Marin County, California. She has received the Walter and Nancy Kidd Award for First Place in Fiction Writing and an Honorable Mention from the literary magazine Glimmer Train. She is currently pursuing her M.A. in Creative Writing at the University of California, Davis. This is her first published work.
Namrata Verghese, is a second-year undergraduate student at Emory University, a Robert W. Wood-ruff Scholar, and an English/Creative Writing and Psychology double major. Her work has been published in “Daya Houston,” “Alloy Literary Magazine.” She was a semi-finalist in the 2015 NCTE Norman Mailer Stu- dent Writing Award competition, a finalist in the 2016 NYC Midnight Fiction Challenge.
Laura Tansley's writing has appeared in Butcher's Dog, Cosmonaut's Avenue, Lighthouse, New Writing Scotland, PANK, The Rialto and is forthcoming in Stand, Tears in the Fence and Southword. She is also co-editor of the collection 'Writing Creative Non-Fiction: Determining the Form'. She lives and works in Glasgow.
Michael LaPointe, is a writer and critic in Toronto, Canada. He contributes to the Times Literary Supplement.
Dakota James is a fiction writer from Texas, now in Brooklyn, New York. His short stories have ap- peared in various publications including Fiction on the Web, Write Out Publishing, and The Saturday Evening Post. James is also the personal assistant and devoted errand-boy to Theresa Rebeck.
Hema Pedhu is a first generation immigrant who left the hot and humid shores of her Chennai home for the cold and windy suburb of Chicago, to get her Masters in Marketing and Communications at Northwestern University. It took her almost nineteen years to finally embrace her first love – fiction writing. She lives, works, and writes in San Francisco and is working on her first short stories collection.
Alaina Isbouts received her B.A. from the University of Colorado. Her work has previously been published in Holl & Lane Magazine. She lives and writes in Denver, Colorado.
Giselle Leeb grew up in South Africa and lives in Nottingham, where she works as a web developer when she is not writing short stories. These have appeared in Ambit, Mslexia, Litro Online, Bare Fiction, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and other places. She recently won the third prize for short fiction in the Aurora and Elbow Room competitions and was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize 2016.