Meet the Team
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Julian Kanagy
Editor-in-Chief. Julian Kanagy is a poet and whose work sets out to explore questions he can’t find other means of asking. He reads, writes, and lives alongside his kitten, Pippi, in Chicago. Both as an editor and in writing his own poetry, Julian appreciates intention, concision, and structural variety.
Per the advice of a mentor, he lives in search of poems that nobody else could have written.
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Mina El Attar
Managing Editor. Mina Elattar is a writer and editor from California whose work explores themes of gender, culture, and belonging. She is the non-fiction managing editor at The Wild Umbrella. She holds an MPhil in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin and a BA from UCLA. She is currently based in Los Angeles.
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Emily Linehan
Managing Editor. Emily, a Tipperary native, has shown an interest in all things literature from a young age. She has been published in the anthology Cork Words 2, Icarus, and is a 2021 runner-up in UCC’s Eoin Murray’s Scholarship. After completing her M.Phil in Creative Writing with Trinity, she is currently in TEFL teaching, and submitting furiously to literary journals.
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Katie Moats
Managing Editor & Social Media Manager. Katie Moats likes to write about relationships that just don’t work. She has a BA in English from Penn State and an M.Phil in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin, and when she’s not writing, she likes to travel and cheer on her favourite sports teams. She currently lives in Chicago.
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Shannon Morrissey
Managing Editor & Outreach Coordinator. Shannon is the Outreach Coordinator at The Wild Umbrella and is an experienced publicist and writer based in Tipperary. She has worked across publishing, marketing and cultural projects in Ireland and Australia, with a focus on building creative and collaborative communities and amplifying emerging voices.
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Aoife E. Osborne
Operations Manager & Poetry Editor. Aoife E. Osborne is a multidisciplinary writer and arts worker originally from Cork and based in Belfast. Her work has been published in Keeping it Under Wraps: Bodies Uncensored, Double Press and Paper Lanterns, among others. She completed her BA in English at University College Cork where she was the 2022 Eoin Murray Scholar. She completed her MA in Arts Management and Cultural Policy at Queen’s University Belfast in 2024, and is currently the Operations & Programme Coordinator with Fighting Words NI.
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Sophia Blush
Fiction & Non-Fiction Editor. Sophia Blush is an emerging writer. She is currently pursuing an M.Phil in Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin. She also attended Vassar College, where she won the Beatrice Daw Prize for Poetry.
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Rose Costello
Fiction Editor. A love of language and literature has Rose Costello to make a living at home in Ireland and abroad for more than 30 years, first as an English teacher, then as a journalist, writer and editor. She has written contemporary fiction, historical fiction, children’s stories and poetry. Over the past two years, she has fallen in love with the short story form and is focusing on that. Based in Dublin, she is perpetually planning to move westwards.
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Clarisse Helou
Fiction & Non-Fiction Editor. Clarisse Helou is a fiction editor and non-fiction editor for The Wild Umbrella. She also is one of our Submissions Directors.
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Laura Jensen
Fiction Editor. Laura Jensen is a current M.Phil. Creative Writing student at Trinity Dublin. She earned a Bachelor's in German and Secondary English Education at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln before completing a Fulbright grant in Vienna.
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Ally Keegan
Fiction & Non-Fiction Editor. Ally Keegan is 23 years old and lives in Cork. She studied English at University College Cork before going on to do a masters in Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin. Ally primarily writes short stories but has ideas of a novel in the hopefully-not-so-distant future. As well as reading and writing, she enjoys listening to music, rewatching the same four TV shows and drinking way too much tea and coffee.
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Angela Thoma
Fiction Editor. Angela, a writer hailing from greater Boston, holds a masters degree in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin (2024). She writes short fiction that explores the intricate dynamics of family bonds, the immigrant experience, and the process of cultural assimilation. You can find her most recent work in New Square, the official publication of the Sancho Panza Literary Society. In addition to her creative pursuits, Angela’s journalistic contributions have appeared in numerous Massachusetts newspapers and prominent online platforms, including MarketScale, Killing Kittens, and Fabl. She is currently working on her first novel.
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Rachel Walshe
Fiction & Non-Fiction Editor, Treasurer. Rachel Walshe is a Meath based writer, previously shortlisted for the RTÉ Short Story Competition. She also received the Puttnam Screenwriting Award for her short film Grando. Her practice encompasses screen, playwriting, short stories and personal essays. She just finished the M. Phil in Creative Writing at Trinity College.
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Laney Conger
Poetry Editor. Laney Conger is a Galway-based writer originally from rural Montana. Laney completed a B.S. and M.S. in Environmental Science and Creative Writing at Stanford University where she was accepted to the Levinthal Tutorial with Stegner Fellow Alison Thumel. She was awarded a scholarship to the New York State Summer Writers Institute Advanced Poetry Sessions in 2024, 2025, and 2026. Her poetry film Heavy Bend was an Official Selection at the Stanford Poetry into Film Festival 2025 where she received the Award for Best Editing. Laney is interested in the intersection of nature, writing, and film, and can be found pondering this convergence while on long hikes.
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Lara Tokar
Poetry Editor. Lara studied literature at the University of Warwick and Trinity College Dublin and she is just as passionate about poetry as she is about pop culture, fashion and the live arts. She is always chasing new experiences, from attending concerts and theatre performances to travelling and going on active adventures. She is fascinated by stories in all their forms and loves thinking about them, whether in a notebook or out loud.
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Róisín Sheerin
Non-Fiction Editor. Róisín has performed in a number of roles including poet, actress and comedian. Having just completed the M.Phil in Creative Writing at Trinity, and turning her writing hand to non-fiction, she is mostly appearing these days as herself.
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Caroline Cappelletti
Poetry Editor.
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Kristiana Filipov
Fiction & Non-Fiction Editor.
The Wild Umbrella’s Mission
The Wild Umbrella originated in Dublin, in the house where Oscar WIlde was born. Our team met as postgraduate creative writing classmates mastering our respective crafts; since then, we have been united in the goal of discovering, promoting, and publishing the best and most interesting works of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction that we can find in Ireland and beyond. It’s free to submit to us, and we also pay our contributors. To help us maintain both, you can donate to our FundRazr or follow us on social media.

