Jean Banas (Illustrator) is a well-established Florida artist living and working in the community of New Smyrna Beach. She can often be seen working in the studios at the Artists’ Workshop and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

Liz Betz (The Sparrow) is enjoying her retirement pastime of writing short fiction which has been published in a variety of markets. She writes from rural Alberta, Canada. The Sparrow is her 40th short story published. Follow her writing blog lizbetz.blogspot.ca for news of her publications.

Tommy Dean (Filaments of Air) is the author of a flash fiction chapbook entitled Special Like the People on TV (Redbird Chapbooks). A graduate of the Queens University of Charlotte MFA program, he has been previously published in the Watershed Review, Spartan, JMWW, Split Lip Magazine, and New World Writing. Find him @TommyDeanWriter on Twitter.

Salvatore Difalco (Relapse) is the author of 4 books. He splits his time between Toronto and Sicily.

Sara Finnerty (Dear Baby Witch) is the Nonfiction Editor of Entropy magazine. She has essays and stories forthcoming or published in Catapult, Literary Hub, Black Warrior Review, Brevity, Longreads, The Rumpus, Joyland, and others. She is the co-curator of The Griffith Park Storytelling Series and is originally from Queens, NY and lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter. Find her at www.sarafinnerty.com.

Jenne Knight (Fat Class) writes poetry and essays, and her work appears in Bodega, The Rumpus, and The Common, among others, and new work is forthcoming from wildness. Her poem, “Elegy for my Father” was nominated for Best of the Net 2016. Please visit www.jenneknight.com for more information.

Rachel Maggio (In Which Sasquatch Moves to the Desert) is a freelance writer and student in the English program at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

Grace March (Cake) is a young writer from the Canadian prairies. This is her first publication.

Cynthia Morgan Nichols (Eight Days in Mercy) lives in midtown Memphis and works at the University of Memphis Libraries. She enjoys painting, yoga and walking through her historic neighborhood.

Optimism One‘s (Grade School Fashion Faux Pas) essays have been published by In Fact Books and The Normal School, among others. He earned his MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Sierra Nevada College and teaches writing full-time at Modesto Junior College in California. He’s currently working on a memoir called Goodbye, Suicide. His blood type is B+ (be positive).

Dion O’Reilly (Gone Sister) has spent  much of her life on a farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains. She studies with Ellen Bass and Danusha Leméris and attends an MFA program in Creative Writing at Pacific University. She has worked as a waitress, barista, baker, theater manager, graphic designer, and public school teacher. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Rattle, The Sun, Canary Magazine, Spillway, Bellingham Review, Atlanta Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Porter Gulch Review, and a variety of other literary journals and anthologies. Her work has been nominated for Pushcarts, the Intro Journals Project, and was a semifinalist in The Folio Literary Journal Poetry Contest.

John Riley (Photograph of My Father) lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he works in educational publishing. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Metazen, Connotation Press, Smokelong Quarterly, Blue Five Notebook, Willows Wept Review, The Dead Mule, and many other places online and in print.

Sarena Tien (Suture Lines) is a queer Chinese-American feminist and Francophile. Her work has appeared in online publications such as Transitions Abroad, The Feminist Wire, Bustle, On She Goes, and Argot. When she’s not trying to become a polyglot, she can often be found fighting for social justice or folding far too many origami stars.

 
Anna Villegas (One Tough German: Part I) worked as a full-time college English professor in California’s Central Valley for forty-one years. Her published work includes four decades of short stories, poems, essays, newspaper columns, and three novels.   Now retired, she lives in Nevada City, California, where the folk, the foothills, and the ghosts of her Gold Rush forebearers supply inspiration for her fiction.