Check out our editors' playlist for 2026!

Professor Schummer is the author of Six Months in the Midwest, The Ballad of Two Sisters, The Book of Orion, and the forthcoming story collection Keystone Species. She is the director of the creative writing program at CSUP and faculty editor of Tempered Steel.

Hailey Gardner is studying History and also minoring in Museum Studies and Creative Writing. She loves reading, writing, and watching anime and international TV shows like Weak Class Hero, The Trauma Code: Heroes On Call, Love Between Fairy and Devil, and Taxi Driver. Hailey is a strong advocate for accessibility and brings her lived experience as a wheelchair user to her work and studies. She hopes to earn a Master’s in Library and Information Science and become an archivist.

Thomas Vigil searches for strange, heartwarming, and fun stories and has been published in Tempered Steel.

Olivia Winkelman is a history student at CSU Pueblo with minors in creative writing and anthropology. Her work has been published widely, and she has experience editing various literary journals. She plans to attend graduate school for library sciences and public history and is very passionate about the preservation of historical memory. Ultimately, she wants to be an archivist and work with medieval manuscripts. Her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have been previously published in Tempered Steel.

Isaac Samples is an optimist, writer, game designer, and teacher. Science teacher by trade, his hobbies are writing, TTRPGs, tech, and video games - often all at once. He is primarily into Sci-Fi (the harder the better), but sometimes with a little cosmic weird fantasy as a treat. He is loud, highly opinionated, ambitious, direct, and has various other personality traits that are fun and cool.

Shylynn Valenzuela-Flores is an English major with a minor in Italian at Colorado State University Pueblo. She is also a member of a Greek organization on campus called Alpha Psi Lambda. Her academic interests include creative writing across multiple genres, particularly horror, science fiction, and fantasy. She aspires to become a published author and is committed to developing her craft through both scholarly study and creative practice. Outside of her academic work, Shylynn enjoys spending time with her dogs, drinking coffee or tea, and listening to music. She believes that many of her strongest ideas originate from dreams or music, which often serve as inspiration for her writing.

Jayme Trujillo is currently in her third year as an English major at CSU Pueblo. She primarily focuses on writing creative fiction short stories in the genres of horror and mystery; however, she has also had creative nonfiction work published in a previous issue of Tempered Steel. Along with her passions for reading and writing, she also has a love for music and is a part of the CSU Pueblo Concert Choir. 

Abigail Blanchard is a Senior at CSU Pueblo majoring in English and is minoring in both Italian and Leadership Studies. She has experience with outreach projects as well as non-profit work and is passionate about writing, reading, and helping others. She hopes to have a career in grant writing at a non-profit (or multiple non-profits) in the future to utilize her passions. She loves to travel and aspires to travel anywhere in the world that she can in her lifetime. She also does creative writing on the side, mostly non-fiction, and has a poem published in the 2024 edition of Tempered Steel titled "Life and Death Within the Trees." 

Kimberly Sample is a student at CSU-Pueblo pursuing a Bachelor's degree in English with a concentration in secondary education. She hopes to become a high school English teacher where she can foster a safe and supportive space for students to think critically and creatively. She enjoys reading, painting, and spending time with her friends and family.

Chloe VanEvera is an English major student at Colorado State University Pueblo. She has been an avid reader her entire life, and has been writing her own stories since she was small. She hopes to become an educator after graduation. Her favorite genres are fantasy, science fiction, and suspense/horror.

Emily Olonia is a sophomore at CSU-P double majoring in English and Criminology with a minor in Legal Studies. When she's not writing, she enjoys watching baseball and traveling with friends.