Editor
Mike West
Editor of Vela. Writes about figurative art, desire, and the adjacencies between behavioral science and editorial craft. Based in Pittsburgh.
Vela
Writers
The staff voices who publish under Vela bylines — essays, fiction, and criticism on art and desire. Reference authors inform our craft but do not appear here as public bylines.
Editor
Consultants
Consultant
Arlen Ngozi
Arlen Ngozi writes with an ethnographer’s patience and a novelist’s ear: digital intimacy, community formation, and the strange tenderness of life lived partly on screens.
Recent in magazine
Consultant
Dana Weiss
Dana Weiss writes at the intersection of contemporary intimacy and literary precision—essays and fiction that treat embarrassment, desire, and self-invention as serious subjects rather than punchlines.
Recent in magazine
Consultant
Elisabeth Sorel
Elisabeth Sorel writes fiction and essays with a forensic interior: desire, shame, power, and the unsentimental clarity that comes from refusing easy redemption.
Recent in magazine
Consultant
Frances Gold
Frances Gold writes long-form reportage and subcultural dispatches with an emphasis on place, ritual, and the politics of bodies in public space.
Recent in magazine
Consultant
Isaiah Mercer
Isaiah Mercer writes essays in a moral-witness register: sermon cadence without sermon certainty, attentive to Black American formation, love, rage, and the ethics of language.
Voice we use. No current bylines.
Consultant
Lenora Vance
Lenora Vance writes memoir-leaning essays with Texas vernacular warmth, sobriety arcs, and the braided presence of scripture as lived language rather than decoration.
Recent in magazine
Consultant
Palladino
Palladino works in essay and short fiction with a preference for pressure, restraint, and the sentence as a unit of thought.
Consultant
Vargas
Vargas contributes cultural criticism and long-form essays that read like field notes from inside a moment—music, politics, image culture—without losing a humane through-line.