About Croak

Croak is a magazine founded in Spokane, WA by a secret society of three creative writing MFA grads who truly understand and appreciate the glory of the frog. While frogs carry symbolic significance in certain cultures, they are also scientific marvels, meaningful motifs, and cute little guys. From Bashō to Heaney to Lobel, frogs have held a place in literature for centuries. At Croak we want to celebrate the role they play in an artist’s mind whether that may be through poetry, prose, or visual art.

Kurtis

Kurtis Ebeling is a poet living in Spokane, Washington, and a previous poetry editor for Willow Springs magazine. An MA in English and MFA in Creative Writing graduate from Eastern Washington University, Kurtis currently works as quarterly faculty out at EWU and is spending as much of his time writing or editing as he can. His best frog-related lore is that, as a child, he once crawled into a reed-filled ditch with his sister and a couple of his childhood friends to collect frogs but ended up losing a sandal and walking home half-barefoot.

Rook

Rook Rainsdowne is a great lover of animals, poetry, and art. A poetry MFA graduate, they’re currently teaching composition classes at Eastern Washington University. They are a co-founding editor of COOP: chickens of our poetry, a zine much like this one but about chickens!

Shraya

Shraya Singh is an ex-engineer, writer, and teacher from India and loves frogs, Lord of the Rings memes, and epic fantasy (in no particular order). Currently a PhD student at the University of Houston, Shraya has an MFA from Eastern Washington University and has received support for her writing from Yaddo, Community of Writers, Tin House, and Quillisascut. You can find some of her work in the Southern Review, Pacifica Literary Review, and The Spokesman-Review, amongst others.