Online Features

Cover Artist: Katie Simpson

Katie Simpson is an Aptos, California based mixed media artist and Teaching Artist for the Arts Council Santa Cruz County. She is also recognized as a 2025 Spotlight Award recipient by the Santa Cruz County Arts Commission.

Her work explores the intricate relationships between people, memory, and the natural world. A graduate of CUNY with an MFA, and Portland State University in painting, printmaking, and drawing, Simpson creates richly layered landscapes that combine translucent acrylic painting, printmaking, drawing, collage, and photography to reveal the hidden depths of the environments around us. Through vibrant layers of flora and fauna, her work reflects on the ways we experience and remember our time in nature, inviting viewers to examine their own connections to the living world. Her luminous compositions beautifully echo the themes of this Summer Issue of Catamaran—curiosity, discovery, and the wonder that emerges when we look more closely.

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Preview a selection of content from each genre of our Issue 51 - Summer 2026 . To read the work online, click on the title of the piece in the listing below.

Interview: Merlin Sheldrake

The collaborative relationship between humans and funghi

Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist, writer, and speaker with a background in plant sciences, microbiology, ecology, and the history and philosophy of science. He received a PhD in tropical ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama. In 2025, together with Giuliana Furci and Toby Kiers, he won a Climate Breakthrough Award to work with fungi to mitigate climate change. His book, Entangled Life (Random House, 2020), is a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, won the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize and the Wainwright Prize and was nominated for a number of other prizes, including the British Book Awards and the Rathbones Folio Prize. It has been translated into thirty-two languages and sold more than a million copies worldwide.

Fiction: Kat Ricker

Tsunami

Kat Ricker lives in Oregon and has a deep enthusiasm for the Pacific Northwest region where this boat landed. She holds an MA in English. Her books include Something Familiar, The Daculi Witch Chronicles, and Doubting Thomas. She has taught professional writing as an adjunct professor at Washington State University and worked for years as a journalist. Her creative writing has appeared in Talus and Scree anthologies, Paris/Atlantic, Yankee, The Poet’s Voice (Austria), Cambrensis (Wales), and more. Magazines that have published her articles include FATE and UFO. Her short story “Tsunami” is an excerpt from Drift, her novella inspired by the real-life tsunami boat Sai-Shou Maru.

Nonfiction: Bridget Lyons

Full moon broadcast

Bridget A. Lyons is the author of Entwined: Dispatches from the Intersection of Species (Texas A&M University Press, 2025), a collection of essays that explore the author’s interactions with wild creatures and contemplate how we might better share the world with them.

Poetry: Claire Scott

If wars were operas like aida

Mathieu Cailler is the author of seven books: a novel, two short story collections, two volumes of poetry, and two children’s titles. His stories, poems, and essays have appeared in over one hundred publications, including Wigleaf, The Saturday Evening Post, and Los Angeles Times. He has received many prestigious awards, including a Pushcart Prize; a Readers’ Favorite Award; and accolades from the Paris, Los Angeles, and New England Book Festivals.

Translation: Mauricio Montiel Figueiras

Fake silk

Mauricio Montiel Figueiras lives in Mexico and is a writer of prose fiction and essays, as well as a poet, translator, editor, and film and literary critic. He is the author of twenty books in different genres. His work has been published in magazines and newspapers in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Italy, Peru, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He has been resident writer for the Cheltenham Festival of Literature in England (2003) and the Bellagio Center in Italy (2008). In 2012 he was appointed resident writer for the prestigious Hawthornden Literary Retreat at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland. In 2020 he wasselected artist in residence for the Saari Residence in Finland. In 2026 he was selected writer in residence for the Studio 88 Artist Residency in Thailand. His novella Crowd is part of the collective volume Proper Imposters.