Kate LaDew is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a BA in Studio Art. She resides in Graham, NC with her cat, Charlie Chaplin, and is currently working on her first novel.

Zach Fishel is a recent Pushcart nominee and graduate student at the University of Toledo. His work has appeared or is forthcoming from Gloom Cupboard, A Few Lines Magazine, Magic Cat Press, Bolts of Silk, The Montucky Review, Mad Swirl, and many others. His mantra is rye or die, and he can read palms if the price is right. Feel free to find him on Facebook.

James Russell teaches and writes in New Jersey. He blogs at notanotherblahg@blogspot.com and tweets @JamesRussell49. “The Camp Seminole Wiener Wall” is from his short story collection, Strange Arrangements. His work has also appeared in Blip Magazine and The Quotable. He is looking for a home for Jesse Rules, his 78,000-word novel about the fall from grace of a homo-repressed, would-be Catholic school class president, set in grungy 1994.

Stephanie Dickinson was raised on an Iowa farm and now lives in New York City. Her novel Half Girl and novella Lust Series are published by Spuyten Duyvil. Other works include Corn Goddess and Road of Five Churches. Her stories have been reprinted in Best American Nonrequired Reading and New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2008 and 2009. She won New Delta Review’s 2011 Matt Clark Fiction prize judged by Susan Straight. She is an associate editor at Mudfish and with Rob Cook edits Skidrow Penthouse.

Mercedes Lawry has been publishing poetry for over thirty years in such journals as Poetry, Rhino, Puerto del Sol, Folio, New Madrid, Seattle Review, Nimrod, and Salamander. Her chapbook There are Crows in My Blood was published by Pudding House in 2007; her chapbook Happy Darkness was released by Finishing Line Press in 2011. She has received honors from the Seattle Arts Commission, Jack Straw Foundation, Artist Trust, and Richard Hugo House. She has also published fiction as well as stories and poems for children.

Robyn Parnell’s short story “Here is What” is published in the current issue of Bellevue Literary Review. She is an Author’s Guild, SCBWI and Oregon Writers Colony member whose works have appeared in a variety of journals, anthologies and books. A collection of her short fiction, This Here and Now, was published by Scrivenery Press. Coming attractions include a story in the Joy: Interrupted anthology and a juvenile novel (Scarletta Press, 2013).

Ariel Gore is the author of seven or eight books of fiction and nonfiction including Atlas of the Human Heart, The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show, and Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness. She teaches creative writing and cooks up vegan snacks at The Literary Kitchen.

Michelle Cruz Gonzales recently finished a memoir, Pretty Bold For a Mexican Girl: Growing Up Chicana in a Hick Town, and she teaches English and Creative Writing at Las Positas College. Michelle has never published, but she played drums and wrote lyrics in an all-female punk band in the 1990s. The band, Spitboy, toured Europe, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and the United States. She blogs about writing and recollections here and lives in Oakland with her husband, son, and their two Mexican dogs.

Simon Ditlevsen is an avid environmentalist, aid worker, and international marathoner. He wrote the manuscript for the 1991 film It’s Best Aloft, a documentary about life on board the tall ship Danmark. He has also written several articles on swimming technique and coaching. Among his literary influences are novelists Karen Blixen and Astrid Lindgren, and poet Søren Ulrich Thomsen. “When a Man’s Nobler Parts…” is fiction based on anecdotes and experiences he had during a year spent in a rural village in northern Tanzania.

As literacy director for Open Books, Erin Walter helped writers of all ages and backgrounds share their stories. Her own work has appeared in the Austin American-Statesman, the Oregonian, Bookslut, Fametracker, Love, Chicago, On the Fly: Stories in Eight Minutes or Less, and more. She performed at Reading Under the Influence in Chicago and most recently with the punk rock choir Blue Ribbon Glee Club. An enthusiastic traveler, Erin drags her husband and daughter on a quest for Mexican food in every country they visit.

Harried mother of four wild boys, Susan escapes reality between dodging random flying objects and folding mounds of laundry by going into the happy bubble of her writing world. She loves to live in the quiet place of subconscious where stories fester and yearn to be told. Her first novel, Fury, was published in 2003; she was the lead editor for the Las Positas College Anthology and has had several short stories published.

Jenny Hayes grew up in Berkeley, California, and now lives in Seattle. Her writing has been featured in a variety of publications including music magazines (Fizz), alternative local papers (Tablet), tiny li’l zines (Spider Stompin’), and online literary experiments (Significant Objects). She co-authors the blog Yard Sale Bloodbath and is putting the finishing touches on her novel Highway to Hella.

Carrie Herzner falls back on her scissors daily, working as a hairstylist. She falls into her pen nightly, writing poetry and short stories. “Father’s Day 2010” is an excerpt from her upcoming novel. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, and fine-tunes her poetry and prose as a member of the Greater Cincinnati Writer’s League.

Jon Vanderlogh lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two dogs. He spends his summers writing and making music—he’s a synthesizer enthusiast who loves experimenting with sounds—and in the other nine months of the year, he teaches English to at-risk teens. “An Unknown Journey into Wheezing” is a section from a novel he is currently working on about six individuals, all out to change their lives in drastic ways, who instead plunge deeper down the path they desperately wanted to avoid.

Vickie Fernandez is an award-winning writer. Her stories have appeared in many online publications including The Rumpus, Spurt Literary Journal, FYLM and Tiki Tiki. She is the recipient of the 2011 Judith Stark award and a finalist in Hunger Mountain’s 2010 competition for creative nonfiction. Vickie is currently working on a memoir while simultaneously wrangling a new set of unruly tales into submission. She resides in Philadelphia with her handsome and talented husband.

Tom Triumph is a writer living in Vermont. You can download several of his other works here.

Though Jill Stukenberg lived for a short time in Portland, Oregon, during the heady days of 2006 – 2009, she’s returned now to her native Wisconsin. She teaches at UW-Marathon County, and her work has been published in The Sonora Review, Freight Stories, and Magnolia Journal.

Lisa Sinnett is an immigrant to the middle class—and was dismayed to discover shortly after her arrival that it was being dismantled. She enjoys life on her severely curtailed teacher’s salary, because she’s remembered that she has more friends when she is broke, and is considering going off the grid with her family and anyone she can convince to go with her. She admires bicycle commuters, her urban farmer friends, and fellow Detroit teachers who are hanging in there for Detroit. She adores acoustic musicians.

Long ago and far away, before Kenna Lee spent her nights working as a hospice nurse and her days rooted in her kids’ school garden, she traveled in a larger, email-free world where becoming untethered was easier.  Her book about maternal eco-anxiety will be published later this year.

Mai’a Williams is a visionary and media maker. She has lived and worked in the Middle East, southern Mexico and east Africa with refugee and displaced women under the threat of violence, also she has organized and accompanied communities and persons within the US/Canadian urban landscape, engaging in issues including: race, working poor, sex work, prisons, drug addiction, police brutality, and queer rights. Living in Cairo, Egypt, she is a freelance writer, poet, journalist, zinester, photographer, multi-media performer, and outlaw midwife.

Jenny Forrester is the recent winner of Seattle’s Richard Hugo House New Works Competition with her essay, “An American Trailer Trash Childhood.” She gets lucky from time to time and a short fiction piece morphs out of her life experience and then falls from her pen and onto the page, like the blood that drips onto the red sandstone in the story “A Compatibilist Woman.”

Rebeca Dunn-Krahn lives in Victoria, Canada, with her husband, two children, six chickens and a cat. Every weekday, she composes angsty haiku in her head as she cycles to her office, where she works as a software developer. Previous publications include a chapter rewrite in a book on programming LEGO robots and a dental-fear confessional on hissyfit.com. Rebeca is currently writing a novel based on her experiences as a Canadian child living in central California in the late eighties.