Pleiades

NOTE: the Wednesday reading has been moved to the UCM Elliott Student Union, room 238. Join us, tonight and tomorrow for the second installment of the 2025 Pleiades Visiting Writers Series! We have the pleasure of hosting writer Ananda Lima. We can't wait to see you! Ananda Lima is the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor, 2024) and Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator at StoryStudio, Chicago. She has an MA in Linguistics (UCLA) and an MFA in Creative Writing (Rutgers University, Newark). Craft, her fiction debut, was longlisted for the Story Prize, the ALA Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and named Best of the Year by Library Journal, Electric Literature, Debutiful, The Chicago Review of Books and more. The New York Times describes it as “a remarkable debut that announces the arrival of a towering talent in speculative fiction.”
Lima will also be joining us again soon as judge for the 2026 Kinder/ Crump Award for Short Fiction.

For this masthead Monday, it is with some sadness, but far more happiness and excitement for her, that we say our farewell to Dr. Jenny Molberg. We could not be happier to have had her at Pleiades and look forward to continuing the great work she has left us. Dr. Molberg will now assume the position of Editor at Large. With that, Jenny Molberg is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023), a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Missouri Review, Oprah Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others.
Formerly Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she directed Pleiades Press and edited Pleiades: Literature in Context, she is now Professor of Writing, Literature, and Publishing and Editor-in-Chief of Ploughshares at Emerson College.

It is with great excitement that we do a reintroduction of Dr. Caroline Crew. Dr. Crew has been moved to the role of Editor in Chief of Pleiades, and we could not be more happy to have her. Caroline Crew is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she serves as Editor in Chief of Pleiades: Literature in Context. Her poetry and prose appears in POETRY, Kenyon Review and The Believer, among others. Author of the essay collection Other Girls to Burn, winner of the AWP Prize, her next book is a poetry collection, Don’t Cut Your Own Bangs, from YesYes Books. Crew holds degrees from the University of St Andrews, the University of Oxford and Georgia State University. Originally from Kernow (Cornwall), Crew lives in Kansas City, where she co-owns a bookstore, .