Leadership Team


Editor in Chief

Phoebe English

Phoebe English is currently studying editing and publishing at BYU, so if you have a paper due tomorrow and some cash you’re willing to part with, she might consider helping you out. She loves writing and participates in Nanowrimo every year. She loves anything written by Brandon Sanderson and is ready to talk all things Cosmere with anyone who will listen. When she’s not writing, she can typically be found wandering around campus thinking about dragons and how to keep the one she has in her apartment hidden from her roommates. 

Managing Editors

Holly Gerber

Holly Gerber spends entirely too much time reading obscure Wikipedia articles when she should be studying for her double major in editing and publishing and public health. If you ever want to hear about strange sequels to classic books, Holly would be more than delighted to tell you. She also enjoys playing the piano and hand bells, taking an excessive number of pictures of her family’s adorable dog, and planning her eventual rise to fame as the world’s foremost expert on bananas (it’s a long story).

Kate Fowler

Kate Fowler is an Editing and Publishing major at BYU and hopes that it will ensure that she will read stories until she dies or goes blind—whichever comes first. She wishes there was a better way to friend people on Goodreads so she could spam their feeds with her favorite books to convince them to finally take her word and read them. She firmly believes that rollerblades are the superior form of transportation and that ferrets should be redubbed “fuzz noodles”. Kate frequently suffers from semantic satiation, but that has not stopped her from editing scripts for hours until English no work no more.

Chloe Seguine

Chloe Seguine is an editing and publishing major at BYU, where she spends an unreasonable amount of time stressing over Oxford commas and em dashes. She enjoys reading, having existential crises while listening to Taylor Swift, and watching The Great British Baking Show, and she has an intense aversion to writing about herself in the third person. After she graduates, she hopes to get a big-kid job so that she can afford to live.

Fiction

Lauren Johansen

Art

Alaina Higbee

School, sleep, church, food, graphic design, yoga, music, artwork… in that order. Alaina doesn’t have time for much but if you’re willing to share your obscure music suggestions or discuss why Tony Stark is the perfect person to pattern yourself after, she just might be able to squeeze you into her schedule. If she can catch a break you’ll find her at the gym, or at her favorite cafe sipping something far too sweet.

Claire Thompson

Claire likes to live on the edge. Her position as art director lies on the edge between her passions for art and for sci-fi/fantasy. Her major (animation) balances her love of art and storytelling with her interest in computer programming. She loves to hike, which is essentially the art of traveling to the highest edge you can find. And this bio is right on the edge of being too long, so she’s going to stop here. 

Poetry

Trish Evans

Nonfiction

Currently looking for a new one.

Social Media

Merlin Blanchard, Director

A half-wizard who can’t decide if he’s from the Appalachian or Rocky Mountains. When Merlin isn’t pretending to be a polyglot (do dead languages count?), he’s studying editing and publishing, creative writing, or Japanese (and sometimes Old English). To all of Leading Edge’s dismay, he doesn’t know any magic tricks, but that hasn’t stopped him from being a mediocre Magic: The Gathering player.

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