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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.

Consultants

Portrait soon

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.

Magazine bylines will appear here.

Portrait soon

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.

Magazine bylines will appear here.

Portrait soon

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.

Magazine bylines will appear here.

Portrait soon

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.

Magazine bylines will appear here.

Portrait soon

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.

Magazine bylines will appear here.

Portrait soon

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.

Magazine bylines will appear here.

Portrait soon

Consultant

Palladino

Palladino works in essay and short fiction with a preference for pressure, restraint, and the sentence as a unit of thought.

Magazine bylines will appear here.

Portrait soon

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.

Magazine bylines will appear here.