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Meet the Team
Sabine Wilson-Patrick
Editor-In-Chief
Sabine Wilson-Patrick is originally from Barbados and is in her third year at Cardiff University studying English Literature & Creative Writing. She has performed at the Hay Festival and her writing has been nominated for the Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions anthologies. Her work can be found in Midnight & Indigo, Aster Lit, Nawr Magazine and Ethereal Magazine. She is also the Managing Editor of Rover Magazine. She created The Tonic Review because she loves the diversity of creative writing that literary magazines foster.
Caitlin Tina Jones
Poetry Editor
Caitlin Tina Jones is a third-year Creative Writing student and emerging poet from Hengoed, South Wales. Her poems have been published by The Poetry Society’s Young Poets Network, Poetry Wales, and Propel. Her poems have also featured in various anthologies, including He, She, They, Us: Queer Poems (Pan Macmillan) and Beyond/Tu Hwnt: Anthology of Welsh D/deaf and Disabled Writers (Lucent Dreaming). She is currently working with Edge Hill University as a Lived Experience Consultant on Arts4Us, a £2.5m research project using creative solutions to alleviate stress from children and young adults with mental health struggles.
Lydia Byrne
Poetry Editor
Lydia Ruby Byrne is a third year International Relations and Politics student currently living in North Carolina, USA. Her passion for writing emerged in high school where she was immersed in her local zine culture and now is a consistent contributor to Quench. Besides writing, Lydia enjoys reading an expansive range of genres, drawing, cross stitch, and following anything fashion related. Along with her studies, she is a communications intern for an EU-US education outreach program based in Brussels and hopes to merge her creativity and interest in public policy into a career in diplomacy.
Lowri Player
Deputy and Poetry Editor
Lowri Player is a third year English Literature student at Cardiff University. As well as working on The Tonic Review, she is a contributor for both Quench and Empoword Journalism. Although she is pursuing a career in editorial publishing, she thoroughly enjoy creative writing and would love to give others a platform to share their own works. Lowri has specific interest in iconoclastic works surrounding religion and love a gothic novel. In her spare time, she loves to play piano and has gone on to win several events including the semi-final of EPTA’s UK annual competition. Her main aspiration is to encourage and promote as much creativity in people’s lives as she can.
Nik Pelley
Poetry Editor
Nik Pelley is in their third year of the English Literature with Creative Writing BA at Cardiff University. They are also part of the team that runs the Store-Bought Flowers creative writing zine at the university and have helped to organise fundraising events alongside it. In addition to writing, they enjoy photography in their free time, and co-host Crow Calls, a monthly open mic night based at the university during term. Other activities they enjoy include crochet, netball, and heading to Bute Park to feed the crows and get through their reading list. They most often like to read and write gothic pieces, but also engage with poetry and realism.
Ally-Joh Gowan-Day
Deputy and Prose Editor
Ally-Joh Gowan-Day has a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing and is currently studying an MA in Creative Writing. Her writing focuses on life with trauma, specifically dealing with childhood trauma and PTSD. Previously she has worked as an editorial assistant for Wales Arts Review and as a freelance editor and researcher for companies such as Open Genius and Kogan Page. She originally hails from Somerset but has lived in the Valleys for 6 years now and can’t imagine herself anywhere else, even with the rain and the hills her car engine hates.
Alex Childerstone
Deputy and Prose Editor
Alex Childerstone is a 19 year-old writer from Buckinghamshire, with a passion for a wide range of literature, from contemporary short stories to Gothic horror. His only publication to date is within The Tonic Review, but intends to seek out a career as a short story writer or screenwriter. Alex has a deep love for the natural world, which often shines through in his writing and choice of reading. When not sat at his desk, you can often find him hiking or wild swimming around Cardiff, or tending to his collection of houseplants and playing the guitar.
Molly Wilcox
Prose Editor
Molly Wilcox completed her BA in English Literature at Cardiff University in 2025 and is now working towards an MA. Growing up and living in Bristol, her love for pros began when she read A Room of One’s Own at 15 years old. She has since developed a passion for modernist fiction, focusing her undergraduate dissertation on the significance of solitude in Virginia Woolf’s writing. Alongside university, she bartends and tutors GCSE English Literature students. As an editor for Tonic, Molly is keen to celebrate and amplify the wide range of perspectives that Welsh students have to offer in their writing.
Molly Eaton
Prose Editor
Molly Eaton is a student studying English Literature and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University, originally from Essex. She has a passion for prose and script and one day hopes to build a career within the London theatre space. Molly feels like she lives two lives; one in the city and one by the sea. When at university she enjoys morning runs along the seafront and when at home, eating good food and watching a play that will somehow always make her cry. She is excited to give students a voice within Tonic and the opportunity to share their imagination.
Lily Spitza
Prose Editor
Lily Maria Spitza is a third-year English Literature and Creative Writing student at Cardiff University. Growing up in a bilingual household in Germany, her interest in language and storytelling emerged early on in her life and has only flourished since she moved to Wales for her BA. She is active in the poetry scene of the University, competing for and coaching the slam poetry team, and works as a Visual Arts Editor for Haystack Magazine. Her passion lies in multimodal storytelling; she writes stage plays for the university's drama societies whilst working on her growing collection of short stories, aiming to work against the rigid barriers of literary forms. In her free time, she is a fencer and invests much time aside from writing in student theatre, both on and off stage.
Chloe Woodhouse
Deputy, Poetry Editor and Resident Artist
Chloe Woodhouse is a joyful poet and illustrator based in a rural town, surrounded by wood pigeons and seasonal flowers, like the summering plant aquilegia
Avery Rabbitt
Resident Artist
Avery Rabbitt (she/her) is an arts psychotherapist, writer, and cross-disciplinary folk artist based in Cardiff. Having grown up on a religious homestead in the rural Pacific Northwest USA, she dabbles with colored pencil, darkroom photography, book-making, music, writing, performance, and sculpture– basically anything she can find on foot– to explore themes of deconstruction, inter-species kinship, and queerness. Her current projects include The Mysterious Cricket, a puppet musical about lost histories, lesbians, and tenants’ rights, an upcoming album with the pop duo sky frog, and a short film production of her experimental sculptural book, the kin bible.
Poppy Taylor
Resident Artist
Poppy Taylor is a student at Aberystwyth University, studying a joint honours degree in English literature and History/Welsh History. She has a strong interest in children's literature alongside poetry and prose that explores human behaviour and life. Some of her favourite work includes: The Secret Garden, Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Frankenstein and Robin Hobb's Farseers trilogy. Despite studying literature and history, she has always had a passion for art. She works primarily in watercolour and ink, but occasionally dips into print-making. She plans to produce her own children's book one day alongside her aim to go into teaching or tattoo artistry. She wants to create pieces that invoke a sense of nostalgia and love for the natural world, encouraging children to love it too.