Associate Editor Leah Burchfiel, award-winning journalist, grew up in rural northwestern Oklahoma and hasn’t managed to leave yet. She recently graduated with a bachelor degree in English from Northwestern Oklahoma State University with a minor in Mass Communications.
She copy-edited the student-run newspaper and media website and brought semi-colons and the distinction between restrictive and non-restrictive appositives to the lawless wilds of the sports pages. This journalistic training tends to carry over into fiction in the forms of fact-checking, a preference for brevity, and capitalizing registered trademarks like Dumpster and Crock-Pot.
Her own writing for the newspaper and the media website has won awards from the Oklahoma Collegiate Media Association and the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ). Her work won national runner-up in the 2012 SPJ Mark of Excellence Awards for online opinion and commentary. Her hobbies include writing, reading books and blogs and reviews, and watching subtitled anime to keep up her thoroughly amateur knowledge of Japanese.