Cristina J. Baptista (“wilderness’) is a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at Fordham University in New York City. Her area of concentration is Modern American Literature. She has presented scholarly research on T.S. Eliot and Stevie Smith’s writings. Additionally, Ms. Baptista’s fiction and poetry have also appeared in Horizons interdisciplinary journal. Her poetry is forthcoming in No, Dear Magazine and Mannequin Envy. 

Samantha Bell (“Shift and Sway”) lives in Lawrence, Kansas with her husband Dan. She is pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of Kansas. Aside from writing essays and poems, she likes to run, dance, and visit her relatives in New York and New Hampshire.

Shane Borrowman (“That’s Not What You Saw”) is an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he teaches courses in alternative memoir, professional editing, and medieval Islamic rhetoric. Aside from being the proud father of twins, he is author/editor of numerous works, including collections such as Trauma and the Teaching of Writing and The Promise and Perils of Writing Program Administration. His nonfiction has appeared most recently in Brevity.

Tim DeMay (“A Condition”) is a junior at Northwestern University. He is a Philosophy and Creative Writing major and is currently specializing in the philosophy of language. Much of his free time is spent wondering whether this speciality hurts or helps his writing.

Giovanni Diaz (“Come, the River Man”) is a writer and poet from New York City. His poem "The Indoctrination of Pastures” was published in Barnwood Press Magazine. He wishes to continue to write for as long as he can in the hopes that his words can be a positive addition to the human experience.

Kristen Foster (“The Note”) was born and raised in Colorado Springs and is currently a senior at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She writes both fiction and nonfiction, has dabbled in songwriting, and hopes to forge her way through the publishing industry both as an author and editor.

Christopher Field (“We’re in Paris”) was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Melody Gough (“Why Wasn’t it Bobby?”) has taught poetry in online classrooms for almost a decade and has also taught English composition at the local university for several years as well. Melody writes both poetry and memoir. Her chapbook, Ladies Night at the Bluebottle Kiss was published in October. Gough earned a Master of Arts in Teaching English with a concentration in writing is from the University of Nevada, Reno.

Ellen Herbert (“Washington, D.C., June 1944”) has written numerous personal narrative essays, which have been published in The Washington Post, Alimentum, The Rambler Magazine, The Sonora Review, and other magazines. She is also the recipient of The Flint Hills Review 2006 Creative Nonfiction Prize. Herbert teaches writing at Marymount University and the Writer’s Center, Bethesda, Maryland.

Andrea Herbst (“Tomatoes”) is originally from Minnesota, began university in Pennsylvania, and is currently a junior at the University of North Dakota. Herbst currently studies German and is working towards a B.A. in English. She hopes to get into the publishing and editing field, but feels that backpacking around Europe for a bit would do her just as well.

Caley Murray (“Hard Hands”) is an English major at the University of Nevada, Reno.  Murray dabbles in creative non-fiction, activism, and poetry in her spare time.

Kristine Ong Muslim (“Little Jimmy receives a postcard from home” and “Nothing left to write about”) has seen her work published or forthcoming in over two hundred journals and magazines worldwide. Her work has appeared in Blue Fifth Review, Chimera Magazine, Dog Versus Sandwich, GlassFire Magazine, Grasslimb, GUD Magazine, and Slow Trains.

Jennifer Reyna (“Down, Down, Down, Down”) is an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, where she studies English and Creative Writing. Reyna has won a Hopwood Award for her work Cricket and Other Selected Short Stories and the Cowden Fellowship for Hands Down and Other Selected Poetry. She has also won the Lynda Buell Van Boven Endowed Scholarship in English Language and Literature for 2007-2008. She has been published in The Oleander Review, the undergraduate-run literary review at the University of Michigan, and The Michigan Daily.  

Terry Sanville (“Ruby”) lives in San Luis Obispo, California with his artist-poet wife  and two cats. . He writes full-time, producing short stories, essays, poems, an occasional play, and novels. Since 2005, Sanville’s short stories and essays have been accepted by more than sixty literary and commercial journals, magazines, and anthologies including Storyteller, The Yale Angler’s Journal, and the Southern Ocean Review. Sanville is also an accomplished jazz and blues guitarist.

Amy Mae Schimpf (“Body #2”), originally from Portland, Oregon, is an MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. In addition to writing poetry, she is also working on a lyric memoir of the years she spent hitchhiking and riding freight trains.

Brooke Sossin (“Ribbons”) is currently a junior at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She is majoring in creative writing and mathematics, and is currently working on a novella. She hopes to pursue a career in teaching either English or math--in addition to writing as much and as frequently as possible.

Alex Stephens (“Never Date a Writer”) lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he studied Film and English at the University of Utah. Stephens also studied Creative Writing at Goddard College in Vermont. His work has appeared in the online journal Our Stories.

Chris Yun (“The Buoyancy of Citrus”) was born and raised in Poughkeepsie, New York. Yun holds a degree in English from Northwestern University and is currently a medical student in Chicago.