Jeff Barry (“Forever Unaware”) lives in Buenos Aires where he wanders the street of the city when not writing. Before relocating to Argentina, he held faculty positions at the University of Tennessee, Old Dominion University, and the University of Miami. He is assistant editor of the International Literary Quarterly.

Paul Bergstraesser (“Ministers’ Row”) has had his fiction and nonfiction published in Another Chicago Magazine, The Barcelona Review, Other Voices, Body Electric, and Sojourn. He lives in Laramie and teaches literature and creative writing at University of Wyoming.

Steven Bird (“Embrace the Shining Sea”) is a new writer. He is a fishing guide who divides his time between California and the Northwest. His articles, stories and poems have recently appeared in Rogue Voice, Keepgoing, Cause and Effect, Headwaters Journal and StoryArc. His first book: Upper Columbia Flyfisher - Notes, Stories and Secrets from the Shining Reach (Amato Books), a collection of essays, is due to be released in January 2009.

Matthew Bornak ("A Piper’s Tune") teaches in Pittsburgh’s South Hills neighborhood. He resides in rural Southwestern Pennsylvania where he studies and writes. Matthew holds a Degree in Liberal Studies concentrated in English from Clarion University. "A Piper’s Tune" is dedicated to his Grandmother, Margaret Bradley Cunningham (1925-2001).

Sean Brennan is a singer-songwriter who currently heads up the experimental electro-pop project Yellow Minute. He lives in Tempe, Arizona.

Erin Bruno (“The Insomniac”) has seen her poetry appear in the literary magazine Defenestration and in two editions of the New Jersey entertainment magazine Upstage. Her poetry will also be published in the fall 2008 Paulinkskill Literary Anthology. Her poetry and photography have also been featured in several publications. Bruno graduated in May 2007 from Arcadia University with a B.A. in Communications. Additionally, Bruno is a regular music writer and the lead singer/lyricist of the rock/alternative band, Project Autumn.

J.R. "Bob" Campbell (“A Gun Ain’t No Good Without Bullets”) is a native of Amherst, Texas, who graduated from West Texas A&M University and has worked for nine newspapers as a reporter, photographer and editor.

Michael Chiarello is an award-winning TV personality, author, and winemaker. His cooking is heavily influenced by his Southern Italian heritage, which plays out in his cooking shows, books, and wines. He manages the award-winning Chiarello Family Vineyards, as well as NapaStyle--an ever-expanding purveyor of cookware, furniture, and food. He has hosted several cooking series for PBS and Food Network, including the current Easy Entertaining with Michael Chiarello, which has won three Emmy Awards-more than any other show on Food Network.

Christy Diulus (“The Fitz Projector”) is the editor of Chatham University's literary journal, The Fourth River, and has been on staff since 2004. Her fiction has recently appeared in Peeks and Valley and SNReview. A lover of all things literary, she also teaches English at the Community College of Allegheny County and works at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

Nicholas Fox (“Vasya”) is a fiction writer currently working on a series of short stories about Russia before and after the fall of communism. He hopes, one day, to finish a novel on the same theme. He lives in Vancouver, B.C., with his wife and two daughters.

Ken Hada (“Designs”) is an Associate Professor at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma where he directs the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival held annually in April. Some of his poetry appears in his recent book The Way of the Wind (Village Books Press, 2008) as well in regional journals such as Oklahoma Today, Kansas City Voices, Westview, Crosstimbers, RE:AL Flint Hills Review, among others.

Colleen S. Harris (“Unwanted”) is an assistant professor and librarian at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Her work appears in descant, Adirondack Review, Wisconsin Review, Appalachian Heritage, and others. She is ruled by her basset hound Otto's iron paw , and spends her free tiem working on an MFA in Creative Writing at Spalding University.

Stephanie Izard was born in Chicago, Illinois and grew up in Stamford, Connecticut. She worked for several high-profile restauranteurs before opening her own space, Scylla. Her restaurant was was, in 2007, named by Bon Appetit as one of the best small restaurants in the country. She is the winner of Top Chef: Chicago and is currently working on opening a new restaurant in Chicago.

Michael Lee Johnson (“I Trip on My Poems (Version 2)”) is a poet and freelance writer from Itasca, Illinois.  He is the author of The Lost American: from Exile to Freedom. He has also published two chapbooks of poetry and is presently looking for a publisher for two more. He has been published throughout the world.

Jessica Machado (“Wound Up”) lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is completing her MA in creative nonfiction. She currently writes for The Oregonian and has covered arts, music and culture for various publications in Portland, Los Angeles and Honolulu.

Tim Mayers (Intelligence Manifesto) is the winner of our 2008 Paradigm Novel Contest. He is an associate professor in the English Department at Millersville University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches advanced composition, creative writing, rhetoric, and literary criticism. His scholarly book, (Re)Writing Craft: Composition, Creative Writing, and the Future of English Studies, was published in 2005 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Intelligence Manifesto is his first published work of fiction.

Keith Norbury ("Ice") is a writer and editor from Victoria, British Columbia. Another of his short stories, "Bedlamer Boys," recently appeared in the Adirondack Review. He is now looking for a publisher for his coming-of-age baseball novel, Switch!

Joseph Reich (“The Harlem-Valley Psychiatric Center-a clinical case study”) is a social worker who works out in the state of Massachusetts. He has a wife and handsome little son with a nice mop of dirty-blonde hair, and when they all get a bit older, hope to take them back to play in the parks and playgrounds of New York City.

Michael Ruhlman is a writer and journalist who lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. His works have primarily focused on chefs and the world of professional cooking. He is the author of the much-lauded The French Laundry Cookbook (co-written with Thomas Keller), a trilogy of chef-related books (The Making of a Chef, The Soul of a Chef, and The Reach of a Chef) and, most recently, The Elements of Cooking.

Charles Rutter (“4%”) is a poet and “prospective architecture grad student” living in Dallas, Texas.  He graduated from The University of Texas in Dallas with a Bachelor’s in Literary Studies. Prior to Paradigm, he has been published in “Sojourn.”

Panteha Sanati (“Under a Papery Roof”) was born in Iran, and despite having lived in the United States for 22 years, she describes her condition as “an ideological straddling of two cultures, where the cultural chasm does not get any shallower with the passage of time.”

Diana Shellenberger (“A Good Man”) grew up in California and has lived in Colorado for fourteen years, where she and her husband are raising their two sons. Playing in the mountains all year round refreshes and inspires her. Her nonfiction work has been published in the Denver Post, Boulder Daily Camera, Colorado Weekly, The New Brewer and ourecho.com. “A Good Man” is her first short story accepted for publication. She enjoys the challenge of creating characters who are ordinary people accidentally endowed with wisdom.

Alexey Titarenko is a Russian photographer. Titarenko has received numerous awards from institutions such as the Musee de l'Elysee in Lausanne, Switzerland. He has participated in many international festivals, biennales, and projects and has had more than 28 personal exhibitions, both in Europe and the United States. His works are in the collections of major European and American museums, as well having been the subject of numerous award-nominated books and a documentary.

Virginia Walker (“His Offering”) teaches English in northern Virginia. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in various literary journals, and she will complete her Master's degree for Writing Popular Fiction this year.