CORE STAFF
zaum XS 2022
Senior Editor
Ali Gervacio
a transfer student majoring in English Creative Writing with an AA-T in Liberal Arts. She’ll be graduating SSU at the end of Spring ‘22 when she’ll receive her BA in English. Her personal narrative “Horns” was published in The Wall 2020, Saddleback Community College’s Literary Journal. The Wall 2020 received a Literary Arts Magazine Pacemaker Finalist Award from the Associated Collegiate Press. Today, Ali can be found in the back corners of Starbuck cafes huddled with her laptop, surrounded by piles of work, and a 30 oz. Strawberry Acai Refresher cradled in her cold dead fingers. Hopefully Ali’s chronic caffeine addiction will help her pursue her dreams of creating stories to inspire others the same way her favorite books sparked her love for writing. But when Ali isn’t writing, she’s crocheting! Find her online shop on Etsy, Depop, & Instagram @bunniboutique_
Poetry Editor
Audrey Cadena
currently in her third year of attending Sonoma State University, where she is an English major with a concentration in Creative Writing and a Film Studies minor. She fell in love with reading Young Adult Fiction & Fantasy novels when she was in middle school, and she aspires to write and publish her own novels one day. In addition to being Zaum’s poetry editor, Audrey is one of the senior editors for the REVIVAL zine, a student-run online intersectional feminist magazine, that releases bi-monthly publications. She is also a professional overthinker and a chronic procrastinator. You can read her articles from the REVIVAL zine here: https://therevivalzinesonomastate.wordpress.com/tag/audrey-cadena/
Prose Editor
Johnny Protiva
currently in his sophomore year at Sonoma State and enrolled in the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies; he plans to major in creative writing or philosophy. His story Ephemeral Cells was included in the twenty-fifth edition of ZAUM and he was given the opportunity by SSU’s School of Arts and Humanities to write a biographical profile of Delphine Metcalf-Foster, the first woman National Commander of the DAV (Disabled American Veterans). Get him in a conversation and he’ll try to persuade you to read his new favorite book, which is usually weird and features characters so impossibly conflicted that you’d want to give each of them a knuckle sandwich. If you think Hamlet’s bad, you’re in for a treat!
Art Editor
Umbra Cox
currently a Senior transfer student studying in the English Literature & Creative Writing program at SSU. Previously, he was a full-time student at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, California where he obtained Associates for Transfer in English Literature, Criminal Law, and Behavioral Science before taking a year off to work with minors with learning and behavioral difficulties. He spends most days out in nature listening to what the trees have to say and illustrating for his various stories that refuse to be written for now.
Faculty Advisor
Gillian Conoley
a poet, editor, translator and filmmaker who likes to watch her students make beautiful magazines.
core staff portraits created by art editor, Umbra Cox