Kyrsten Bean is a writer and musician. She spends most of her time in creative pursuits, and writes a blog encouraging others to do the same at thestifledartist.com. She was featured as Poet of the Month on The Railroad Poetry Project. Her work has been published in several places, such as Oakland Magazine, PoV Magazine, Gutter Eloquence, Amphibi.us, Breadcrumb Scabs, The Camel Saloon and many other fine publications. You can find links to her work at kyrstenbean.com.
Lauren Becker is editor of Corium Magazine. Her work has appeared in many online and print journals, and she has a collection of short fiction forthcoming in Spring 2014 from Curbside Splendor. Her piece tonight appeared in The Rumpus and is, unfortunately, non-fiction.
Hollie Hardy holds an MFA in Creative Writing from SFSU, and teaches English at Berkeley City College. She is a producer for the Beast Crawl literary festival in Oakland, co-host of Saturday Night Special, An East Bay Open Mic, co-curator of Litquake’s Flight of Poets, and a former Editor-in-Chief of Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review. Her work has appeared in Eleven Eleven, sPARKLE & bLINK, The Common, Parthenon West Review, Transfer, Milvia Street, and other journals you’ve never heard of. Her recently completed manuscript, How to Take a Bullet, And Other Survival Poems, is looking for a home, or some spare change. holliehardy@gmail.com
Claudia “Miriam” Reed’s stories won first- and second-place awards in the Redwood branch of the California Writers Club’s 2009 Prose Contest and an honorable mention from the nationwide E. M. Koeppel Short Fiction Contest. In the ’70s, her poems appeared in Quasar magazine and were broadcast on radio station KPOO. She spent 17 years as a news reporter, winning an award for investigative journalism, and has completed a not-yet-published novel. She is at work on a book about her father, a radical who was threatened by the Ku Klux Klan and blacklisted during the McCarthy Era.
Mariya Taher currently works for WOMAN Inc., an agency working to end domestic violence. She also volunteers for the Asian Women’s Shelter, Girls on the Run, and regularly contributes articles on social issues concerning women to RunwayJunkie.com and Global Voices. She received her Master of Social Work from San Francisco State University. She went to the University of California Santa Barbara for her Bachelor of Art degree where she majored in Religious Studies and double-minored in Global, Peace, and Security & Socio-cultural Linguistics.
After a happy childhood dabbling in religious fundamentalism, Midwestern eating, early hip-hop and neo-con republicanism, Ellen Westberg felt she had what it took to fulfill her dream of being paid to write her thoughts down on paper. Since heading out west, she has written for the radio (once), Internet (Facebook updates), and most recently optioned her first feature film script for one dollar (American). Her work has been printed on her office printer, performed throughout the Bay Area and broadcast regionally on KQED.
Zarina Zabrisky is the author of Iron, a short story collection published by Epic Rites Press in 2012. Zabrisky escaped the aftermath of a collapsing communist empire, wrote traveling around the world and started to publish her work in 2011. Since then her work has appeared in Eleven Eleven, Bluestem Magazine, Red Fez and over twenty literary magazines and anthologies in the US, UK, Canada and Nepal. She has received three Pushcart Prize nominations, editor nomination for the 2012 Million Writers Award, and honorable mention for the New Millennium Writings. She was a finalist The Normal School’s Prize in Fiction, 2012. You can find more at www.zarinazabrisky.com