Rosanna Armendáriz
Rosanna Armendáriz grew up in Brooklyn, New York and later moved to the US/Mexico border region where she attended the University of Texas at El Paso and earned a BA in sociology and an MFA in creative writing. She also attended the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops at Texas A&M University, and her short stories have appeared in Callaloo, Bryant Literary Review, and Moon Journal. She has poems in Poetic Voices without Borders (Gival Press 2005), Illya's Honey, Thorny Locust, and BorderSenses. Most recently, one of her short fiction pieces has been selected to be included in the next GirlChild Press anthology Just Like a Girl: A Manifesta! scheduled for publication in August 2008.

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Elaine Batcher
Elaine Batcher has published on education theory and women's studies. Her short stories and poems have appeared in a number of journals including Kalliope, 13th Moon, Bridges, The New Quarterly, Parchment and Descant. She lives in Toronto and meets regularly with a wonderful group of writer-activists called The Lobsters. Her current projects are an exploration of the art of memoir, and a memoir written in poetry.

Jennifer Coke
Jennifer Coke was born in Black, River, Jamaica. An award-winning poet and fiction writer, she has been published in The Henfield Prize Stories and Switchback, and is currently working on a novel, Grace Notes. You can read more of her work at jennifercoke.com.

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Margarita Engle
Margarita Engle is a botanist and the Cuban-American author of several books about the island. The Poet Slave of Cuba, A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano (Henry Holt & Co., 2006), a young adult book written entirely in free verse, has received the Americas Award and an International Reading Association Award, and is a finalist for a PEN Center USA Literary Award. It just received the Pura Belpre Award, the American Library Association's highest honor for Hispanic literature for young people. Short works appear in journals such as Atlanta Review, Caribbean Writer, Hawai'i Pacific Review, Nimrod, and Poetry Salzburg. Margarita's next book is The Surrender Tree, forthcoming from Henry Holt and Co. in April 2008.

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Jennifer Ann Janisch
Jennifer Ann Janisch is an MFA candidate at George Mason University where she is the Editor-in-Chief of The George Mason Review and the Nonfiction Reader for So To Speak. This is her first published piece.

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Zehra Khan
Zehra Khan is a Pakistani American, and worked in Karachi as an art teacher in 2006. During her childhood moving from country to country, she was an avid journal keeper and took written correspondence very seriously. As she established her relationship with art, she began combining the text with images. Her work is often about issues of identity, and the method of text layered can be linked to Islamic calligraphy. You can read her artist statement and see more of her work at http://www.zehrakhan.com. Her biography photo was taken by Christian Heidsieck.

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Kim Liao
When not cooking shrimp dumplings and bao for herself and friends, Kim Liao is currently pursuing an advanced degree at Emerson College, where she teaches composition and works on the nonfiction staff of Redivider. Her scholarly work has appeared in SURJ, a Stanford University journal of research.

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Joanna Ruocco
Joanna Ruocco is an MFA Candidate at Brown University.

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