Rob Carroll
Editor-in-Chief, Creative Director, Contributing Writer
Rob is a Communications Director based in Chicago, Illinois. He is currently the head of Chicagoland communications for a global nonprofit refugee resettlement agency. In the past, he has worked for trade publisher, Sourcebooks, trade agency, Blue Dot Literary, and research nonprofit, the Society of Behavioral Medicine. He was the Managing Editor for peer-reviewed science journal, Translational Behavioral Medicine, and was a marketing consultant for peer-reviewed journal, Annals of Behavioral Medicine. Both journals are published by Oxford University Press. He ran his own content and design business for eight years prior to his work in nonprofit communications, with a number of large companies as clients. His writing has appeared in numerous outlets, but most currently he has been writing exclusively about health equity and refugee resettlement. Dark Matter Magazine is his dream project.
Phil McLaughlin
Director of Media
Phil is a television and film editor based in Los Angeles, California. His most recent projects include AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead, Hulu’s The Path, and the forthcoming Netflix series AWAY. He also collaborated on the short film Subject 19 which recently premiered with the sci-fi brand DUST. When he’s not being overwhelmed by his children, he enjoys listening to podcasts, “reading” audiobooks, and exploring the depths of Shudder.
Eric Carroll
Director of Media Relations
Eric is an Emmy nominated television news producer, assignment editor, and freelance writer based in Chicago, Illinois. He has worked for NBC, FOX, and CW affiliates in major markets like Madison, Milwaukee, and Houston. He even spent a few years as a radio DJ in Illinois. He has extensive knowledge of broadcast production, recording, and distribution, and he is looking forward to building Dark Matter Magazine’s podcasting program from the ground up. He is also an expert in publicity and media relations.
Anna Madden
Acquisitions Editor, Contributing Writer
Anna Madden lives in Fort Worth, Texas. Her fiction has appeared in DreamForge Magazine, where she also volunteers as a First Line Reader, and in the anthology, “Upon a Once Time,” by Air & Nothingness Press. She has a Bachelor of Arts: English degree with a creative writing emphasis from the University of Missouri—Kansas City. To learn more, visit her website at annamadden.com.
Marie Croke
Acquisitions Editor, Contributing Writer
Marie Croke is a fantasy and science-fiction writer whose work has been published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily SF, and Cast of Wonders, among others. She’s an Odyssey graduate and a Writers of the Future first place winner. She lives in Maryland with her family, all of whom like to scribble messages in her notebooks when she’s not looking. You can find her online at www.mariecroke.com.
Marissa van Uden
Acquisitions Editor, Contributing Writer
Marissa van Uden is a freelance speculative fiction editor, a writer, and an associate editor at Apex Magazine. She grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand, has lived in Munich, Berlin, and Los Angeles, and now lives in a log house in Vermont with her husband and a rescue cat named Ripley. She posts about hiking, wildlife, and weird fiction on instagram @marissa.vu and twitter @marissavu.
Alli Nesbit
Lead Sound Designer, Podcast Host
Alli Nesbit has been drawing since she could hold a crayon and telling stories from about that same time too! In the past five years or so she realized that her favorite vehicle for storytelling is tabletop RPGs, and in the past three years she’s been producing and starring in a duet actual play podcast: RPG for You and Me. When she’s not restarting Dark Souls 3 or sending Shepard across the galaxy again, there’s a good chance she’s napping or petting one very sweet cat. Check at her podcast at www.rpgforyouandme.com.
Olly Jeavons
Illustrator
Oliver Jeavons (Olly) is a UK based artist also known as @artofolly. He works with many different medias and styles, and he is always pushing his creativity further. Comic book art, Book cover art, and commissions of all types are included in his portfolio.
Janelle Janson
Features Writer
Janelle is a voracious reader, freelance writer, and reviewer. She currently writes for Tor Nightfire, Cemetery Dance, and Dark Matter Magazine. She enjoys reading books from all types of genres, but her favorites are horror, thriller, and true crime. She read her first Stephen King book at age seven and never looked back. In addition to books, she enjoys photography, coffee, and all things animals. She is also a true crime sleuth and a dilettante puzzle solver. Janelle currently resides in Northern California with her husband, two sweet cats, Mia and Jules, and a loving German Sheprador named Stella. Janelle can be found on Instagram (@shereadswithcats), Twitter (@shereadswthcats), TikTok, and Goodreads. Visit her website at https://shereadswithcats.com/.
Jena Brown
Features Writer
Jena Brown grew up playing make-believe in the Nevada desert, where her love for skeletons and harsh landscapes solidified. A freelance writer, she currently contributes to Kwik Learning, The Nerd Daily, The Portalist, Murder & Mayhem, The Line-Up, Insider, Truity, and Dark Matter Magazine. In addition to writing, Jena blogs at www.jenabrownwrites.com and is active on bookstagram as @jenabrownwrites. When she isn’t imagining deadly worlds, she and her husband are being bossed around the Las Vegas desert by their two chihuahuas. You can find her short story, They Don’t Eat Teeth, in the anthology, What One Wouldn’t Do, out October 2021.
Lucy McLaughlin
Contributing Writer
Lucy is a writer and project manager based in Chicago, Illinois. After graduating from NYU with a degree in Medieval History, she went on to work as a contributing writer and editor for Teen Vogue, LifestyleMirror, and SELF Magazine, and as the Creative Director of HAZE Magazine. Her editorial experience laid the groundwork for her current position as a photo producer/project manager. She has worked with clients such as Harper’s Bazaar, Athleta, and Tatler Magazine. Outside of work, Lucy watches too much TV, trains in Muay Thai, and flops around with her dog, Ham.
Dark Matter Magazine Robot
Worthless Lazabout, Certified Jerk, Interviewer
Dark Matter Magazine Robot was designed by some of the best and brightest minds in the first-year English undergrad program at the local community college over in West Chicago, IL. We ran a contest that asked local area college students to build us a robot assistant with a self-governing AI, and they were the only ones that entered, so here we are, stuck with an inferior model. Thanks to the hard work of some chain-smoking English majors with an axe to grind, the robot’s sole intended purpose was subverted. He was conceived as a means to make our jobs easier, but instead, he makes all our lives infinitely harder. He’s got a massive chip on his shoulder, and he literally hates our guts (meaning our literal human flesh). But we’re not ones to give up on a young mind in need of mentoring, so in a desperate attempt to improve his bitter outlook on life before it’s too late, we have recently tasked him with conducting scripted author interviews in hopes that this forced interaction with decent human beings will help teach him that humans aren’t half bad. Hopefully, he will also learn that his time sheet is NOT a sadistic form of torture invented by us to cause him great pain. It has a strict due date because that’s how payroll works, DMM Robot! It’s not personal! Gah!
Past Staff
Chris Kendzora
Assistant Editor
Chris is a network engineer based in Chicago, Illinois. His professional background is exclusive to information technology and computer science, but he is also quite possibly the world’s foremost authority on the Warhammer 40k novels, much to the chagrin of his teammates. He lives and breathes science fiction and fantasy, and he gets the same amount of enjoyment from reading the Lord of the Rings novels as he does from studying the imagined family lineages of the story’s characters.