Naomi Benaron holds BS and MS degrees in Earth Sciences from MIT and Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous journals. Her short story collection, Love Letters from a Fat Man (BkMk Press 2007), won the 2006 G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Fiction, and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A Shellback, Iron Woman and muthr of Scout, she has just completed her first novel.

DéLana R. A. Dameron, a native of Columbia, SC, is an MFA Candidate in poetry at Rutgers University – Newark. A lover of history and the word, she spends her days forever trying to marry the historical and the literary. She is a member of the Carolina African American Writer’s Collective and a Cave Canem fellow.

Anne Liu Kellor earned her MFA in creative nonfiction from Antioch University Los Angeles. A 2006 Jack Straw writer-in-residence, her essays appear in several anthologies and journals, including Waking Up American and www.stonetablereview.com. Currently, Anne is completing a collection of personal essays, Searching for the Heart Radical, which traces her inner and outer migrations between America and China, her mother's birthplace. She teaches writing workshops in Olympia, WA.

Natasha Marin is a conceptual artist and poet obsessed with liminal spaces, especially those that are difficult to render. Currently, she is bridging the gap by working with stateside and international intra-genre artists. Her latest collaboration involves creating multimedia adaptations of her work with underground Japanese cyberpunk writer/musician, Kenji Siratori. Her work has appeared in several journals including Feminist Studies Journal, The International Poetry Review, and The Caribbean Writer.

Maureen Owens received her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles and her BA in Literature from SUNY Binghamton. Her poetry has been widely anthologized, appearing in Knocking on the Silence and Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer's Disease among other works. Born in New Jersey, she lives with her greyhounds in Seneca Falls, New York, where she teaches at Finger LakesCommunity College. Her first book of poetry, She Sleeps With Dogs, is published with Foothills Publishing.

Khadijah Queen's first poetry collection, Conduit, is forthcoming in June 2008 from Black Goat, an imprint of Akashic Books. A chapbook, No Isla Encanta, is available from dancing girl press. Work appears in numerous journals, and two of her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Khadijah studies visual art and new media at Georgia State University. 

Susan Southard holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Antioch University, and a BA in music and theatre from Vermont College.  Author of the plays Homeward, Tales of Tolleson, and Anna Lives!, she is a teaching artist on the Arizona Arts roster and founder/artistic director of Essential Theatre, an improvisational ensemble serving marginalized communities across Arizona. She is currently writing a book about survivors of the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki.