Who We Are
Dream Foundry is a 501c registered nonprofit.
Read our 2022 Annual Report.
Dream Foundry Board
President: Coral Alejandra Moore
Coral Alejandra Moore has always been the kind of girl who makes up stories. Fortunately, she never quite grew out of that. She writes because she loves to invent characters and the desire to find out what happens to her creations drives her tales. She is a 2013 alum of the Viable Paradise writer’s workshop and she has been published by Diabolical Plots, Zombies Need Brains, and Secrets of the Goat People. Currently she lives in the beautiful state of Washington with the love of her life and a dangerously smart Catahoula Leopard Dog where she rides motorcycles, raises chickens, and drinks all the coffee.
Member at Large: Brandon O’Brien
Brandon O’Brien is a writer, performance poet, teaching artist and game designer from Trinidad and Tobago. His work has been shortlisted for the 2014 Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing and the 2014 and 2015 Small Axe Literary Competitions, and is published in Strange Horizons, Reckoning, and New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean, among others. He is the former Poetry editor of the Hugo Award-winning magazine FIYAH. His debut poetry collection, Can You Sign My Tentacle?, is out now from Interstellar Flight Press.
Treasurer: Helena Lawton
Helena Lawton lives in Durham, NC with her husband and three dogs where she works as a Senior Accountant for DMJ & Co., PLLC. In a prior life she wrote short stories and the occasional poem, but now she spends her days collecting books, reading the tax code, and picking out names for her fourth dog.
Secretary: K.M. Veohongs
K.M. Veohongs is a mixed race Thai-American writer of speculative fiction and poetry. As the daughter of an immigrant to the US, she’s often pulled to write about diaspora feelings and the harms perpetuated by colonialism. She is an alum of the Viable Paradise and Roots.Wounds.Words. writing workshops, and her work is featured in Translunar Traveler’s Lounge, CatsCast, and multiple anthologies, including the Bram Stoker Award-nominated Mother: Tales of Love and Terror. She currently resides in New England with her family, which includes a very bratty coonhound mix and an opinionated orange lady cat.
Dream Foundry Staff
Art Contest Coordinator: Ilinca Barbacuta
Ilinca Barbacuta (she/they) is a comically Canadian creator based out of not-that-sunny-but-sunnier-than-you’ve-heard Vancouver, BC. An artist and writer, her work has appeared in Undercities: An Anthology, Moonlight: A Queer Werewolf Anthology, Carpe Noctem: Vampires Through The Ages, and a handful of other independent zines. She organized Malaise, a short fiction horror anthology from marginalized creators and Hiraeth: A Longing for Home, an artbook based around what “home” means to the various artists featured. Ilinca likes creating stories about monstrous humans and humane monsters, reading an obscene amount of Arthuriana articles, fancy hot chocolates, fun facts about eels, crying about fictional space frogs in d&d, and being right but will accept humbling if it’s funny.
Content Manager: Melissa Ren
Melissa Ren is a Chinese-Canadian writer whose narratives tend to explore the intersection between belonging and becoming. She is a prize recipient of Room Magazine‘s Fiction Contest, a Tin House alum, a grant recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts, and a senior editor at Augur Magazine. Find her online at linktr.ee/MelissaRen or follow @melisfluous on socials.
Executive Director: Jessica Eanes
Jessica Eanes, also known as Anaea Lay, lives in Chicago, Illinois, where she engages in a numinous love affair with the city. Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of venues including Lightspeed, Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Pod Castle. When she works for money she has sold real estate, wrangled IT as a PM, and talked people into buying very nice couches. She drinks too much tea. For fun she reads, cooks, eats, plays board games, interrogates people about the logistics of their chosen field, and forms intricate business plans over brunch.
Flights of Foundry Program Co-lead: Cislyn Smith
Cislyn Smith is a poet and short story writer who calls Madison, Wisconsin home. Her wordy work has appeared in Diabolical Plots, Strange Horizons, and Daily Science Fiction. When she’s not helping to wrangle Dream Foundry things, she has been known to crochet tentacles, write stories at odd hours, play ridiculous numbers of games, make lots of lists, and study stone dead languages. She is occasionally dismayed by the lack of secret passages in her house. She lives with the amazingly photogenic kitties that appear in the Dream Foundry newsletter, and also some nice humans.
Flights of Foundry Program Co-lead: Rose Ciesla
Fundraising Manager: Caitlin O’Halloran
Support Administrator: Ellana Rose Thornton-Wheybrew
With extensive experience in moderating for online gaming communities since 2017, Ellana is a queer, disabled, nonbinary, Jewish person who tries xyr best to make places safe and welcoming to all. Xey have two degrees in classical studies and will endlessly talk about the impacts that storytelling has on political change.
Video Content Coordinator: Dawn Vogel
Dawn Vogel has written for children, teens, and adults, spanning genres, places, and time periods. More than 100 of her stories and poems have been published by small and large presses. Her specialties include young protagonists, siblings who bicker but love each other in the end, and things in the water that want you dead. She is a member of Codex Writers. She lives in Seattle with her awesome husband and their cats. Visit her at historythatneverwas.com.
Writing Contest Coordinator: Julia Rios
Julia Rios (they/them) is a queer, Latinx writer, editor, podcaster, and narrator whose fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in Latin American Literature Today, Lightspeed, and Goblin Fruit, among other places. Their editing work has won multiple awards including the Hugo Award. They’ve narrated stories for Escape Pod, Podcastle, Pseudopod, and Cast of Wonders. Find out more at juliarios.com
Dream Foundry and Flights of Foundry Logo Designs: Autumn Evelyn
Autumn Evelyn is a professional illustrator, painter, and designer from Philadelphia, PA. She’s a BFA graduate of the University of the Arts, where she studied illustration and animation. Her style applies surreal imagery to convey thematic resonance. She brings to life images the camera could never capture.
The Anvil and Con or Bust Logos: Yue Feng
Yue Feng, a student of the Art Student League, School of Visual Arts, and Greenwich Village House, is an illustrator who works in New York City. Find Yue on Bluesky.