Haley Pflum, Former Senior Editor

Haley Pflum is studying international business and Spanish for the professions. On the off chance that she’s not working, she can most likely be found reading, crocheting, knitting, or playing cards with her friends. As the founding senior editor for Beyond Thought, her work was designed to carve out a space in her life for the arts where it may be lacking in her degree program, and to encourage others out there to express themselves through art regardless of their background. She feels honored to be the first senior editor and have had the opportunity to watch the journal take flight as it prepared to accept its first submissions from creative undergraduate students. There are so many insecurities plaguing young creators, and she hopes that the Beyond Thought journal can empower others to continue their work and share it with the world.

Raegen Pietrucha, Off-Campus Advisor

Raegen Pietrucha is the founding faculty advisor and current off-campus co-advisor for Beyond Thought. Based on her work in professional and literary magazine publishing, she was approached in 2018 by Beyond Thought’s first member, Britney Trieu, to lend her experience to the online creative arts journal. She has been honored to be assisting a talented, driven student team in its efforts to build the outlet and brand from the ground up ever since. She writes, edits, and consults on creative and professional bases and has more than 100 professional and creative bylines under her belt, including her award-winning chapbook, An Animal I Can’t Name (Two of Cups Press). She received her B.A. in creative writing from the University of Arizona and her M.F.A. in poetry from Bowling Green State University, where she was an assistant editor for Mid-American Review. You can connect with her at raegenmp.wordpress.com.

Phil Castillo

Literature helped Philip discover his love for reading, as well as a very natural ability to create his own stories and become a little storyteller who wouldn’t shut up about imaginary worlds and characters. Initially, he thought that his passion for writing stemmed from its allowance for his imagination to breathe outside of the confines of his little coconut head, but he recognized that writing was a coping mechanism that provided a sense of control that he lacked in a life filled with anxiety and inconsistencies. Ever since, he viewed creative writing as a survival skill that he needed to hone and maintain. He did this as a founding member and former fiction editor of Beyond Thought Creative Arts Journal, where he continued his growth as a writer and wished to enjoy diverse stories and storytellers from around the country. Phil graduated in the spring of 2019 with a Bachelor of Arts in English.

Karissa Luna

Karissa Luna is an undergraduate student with a major in communication studies and a minor in anthropology. She has many diverse interests, which is why she is studying to be a librarian upon graduation. Among her interests are arts and computer science, so Beyond Thought was the perfect opportunity to experience and learn more about both. She was honored to be the first web & graphic design manager for Beyond Thought and hoped to create an online journal that undergraduates across the United States can appreciate and enjoy. Her ultimate goal was to encourage creators and readers to view Beyond Thought as a home to the diverse ideas and perspectives, and she looks forward to the future of the journal.

Hannah Ariesen

The great American writer Joan Didion once proclaimed, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” No matter the genre, the form, or the medium, stories fabricate their way into the collective human consciousness—and it is by no accident. Hannah Ariesen, the poetry editor at Beyond Thought, believes in the power of storytelling. Her deep admiration for stories told through poetry are what drew her to become involved with the journal as it was getting off the ground in the fall of 2018, and she has joined the editing staff in hopes of bringing an innovative new journal to the undergraduate community. Hannah is an English major at UNLV and, in her free time, enjoys reading literature of various genres, writing poetry about the things that matter to her, and being in nature. She would tell you some of her favorite authors, but there are so many great writers and poets that it would be unfair of her to pick only a few!

Isaac Moeckly

Isaac Moeckly took a four-year graphic design course in high school and discovered his passion for vector design and digital art. Returning to traditional art after many years, he developed a unique style that blended abstract elements with organic subjects drawn in ink and continued to experiment by incorporating grayscale watercolor brush pens into his pieces. He also took a computer science class in high school and developed an interest in programming in Java, then went on to learn C++. Now, he is a computer science major at UNLV and was a web designer for the Beyond Thought website.