Alana Merritt Mahaffey is a graduate student earning a Masters in Liberal Arts at Henderson State University. She is the founder and editor of the Arkansas Inmate Collective, an organization that, among other things, published the art and letters of inmates in Arkansas on the Internet. Her poetry has been published in journals that include Fugue, Grasslands Review, Poetry Motel, Eureka Literary Journal, New England Writer, and Lucid Stone. She has been recognized by the National Society of Professional Journalists and the Arkansas Society of Professional Journalists for her editorials, and by the National Society of Arts and Letters for her short stories.