Darrah Cloud's most recent work includes the stage adaptation of Disney's classic, SNOW WHITE, now playing at Disneyland. Her adaptations of Willa Cather's O PIONEERS! and THE BOXCAR CHILDREN, with composer Kim D. Sherman, have toured all over the United States. O PIONEERS! was filmed for American Playhouse with Mary McDonnell in the lead. Her play THE STICK WIFE continues to be produced all over the U.S. and Europe. HEARTS ARE WILD, a rock musical with composer George Griggs opened in Pittsburgh at City Theater in January, 2006 and SABINA, a chamber musical about Jung, Freud and Sabina Spielrein, with book by Willy Holtzman and music by Louise Beach, is in the works, as is MAKEOVER!, a musical based on the lives of female cosmetics moguls in the 1950s. HEARTLAND, an original musical, also with Kim D. Sherman, has been produced in the regional theaters since 2000. She has won numerous awards, including an NEA and a Gilman and Gonzalez-Falla Award. She has written ten movies for television and is an alumna of the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa (poetry) and New Dramatists in New York City.

Ian Grody, screenwriter, playwright, and author, earned his MFA in Dramatic Writing from Tisch (NYU). He is the recipient of the Artistine Mann Award for Fiction, the Hemingway Society Hinkle Award, the Cinequest Film Festival Award for Screenwriting, the Ivy Film Festival Award for Best Feature Length Screenplay, the Bristol Drama Society Playwriting Award, the Venable Herndon Screenwriting Award, and the Goldberg Fellowship & Scholarship (Tisch). His plays have been produced internationally and his fiction published in several journals. Please send words of encouragement, scathing critiques, naked pictures, PayPal money orders, and fried chicken recipes to igrody@hotmail.com.

Stephanie Johnson lives in Madison, Wisconsin. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly , Night Train, VerbSap, Keyhole Magazine, Lily, and Fickle Muses. Her essays have regularly appeared in The Rambler in her column "No Do-Overs."

Toshiya Kamei is the translator of The Curse of Eve and Other Stories (2008) by Liliana V. Blum and the chapbook Collection: Ekphrastic Poems by Ericka Ghersi (2007), as well as selected works by Edgar Omar Avilés. [Quay note: No photo by translator request.]

J.W. Kurz is senior writer and columnist for the Record-Journal newspaper. His work has appeared in Salon.com and Underground Voices. Contact: jwkurz@comcast.net. Record-Journal photo credit.

Mary Carroll Moore is a writer, writing teacher, and painter—and occasionally sings in a new-age Mamas-and-Papas-style group called Keystone. She teaches book, essay, and memoir writing at the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center in Westchester, New York, and The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. Her writing has been widely published; her stories and novel excerpts have won awards from Glimmer Train Press, the McKnight Fellowship, and the Loft Mentor Series. She is shopping her recently completed novel, Qualities of Light, to publishers and beginning her next novel with the same unruly characters. Before getting bit with the fiction bug, she was a journalist and nationally syndicated columnist with the Los Angeles Times and author of ten books in the medical, health, diet, and self-help fields. Her last book, a self-help/memoir, How to Master Change in Your Life, is in its third printing. Her landscape paintings are done plein-air in the Adirondack Mountains, where she takes regular sanity breaks from writing. Her art has been exhibited all over the U.S. and was recently featured in the New York Times. She lives alongside an apple orchard in northwestern Connecticut with her partner and their teenage son. Photo by Bruce Fuller. Contact: www.marycarrollmoore.com.

Edgar Omar Avilés was born in Morelia, Michoacán, in 1980. He is the author of La noche es luz de un sol Negro (2007). His stories have appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including the 2004 and 2005 editions of Los mejores cuentos mexicanos (The Best Mexican Short Stories). In the U.S., Toshiya Kamei has published translations of his stories in SmokeLong Quarterly, MonkeyBicycle, Sleepingfish, and elsewhere.

Ellen Visson is a six-time Pushcart nominee for fiction, and a finalist for the 2007 Eric Hoffer award. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Ascent, The Chattahoochee Review, Pleiades, The Literary Review, Hunger Mountain, Absinthe: New European Writing, descant, Best New Writing 2007, First Intensity, Existere, The Jabberwock Review, Ruminate, ByLine, Tiferet, and The American Drivel Review.
She and her husband, a painter, have lived in Switzerland for twenty-four years only from his art, which is shown extensively in museums and galleries. Photo is copyrighted by Horst Tappe and used with permission.

Jenny Wales Steele’s fiction has been published in current or recent issues of juked.com, applevalleyreview.com, darkskymagazine.com, Pebble Lake Review, The Bullfight Review, Salt Hill, Harpur Palate, The First Line, and jerseyworks.com. Her work has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She’s a graduate of The College of Santa Fe, New Mexico, but has since lived in her native Arizona.

Kalela Williams received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College. She currently lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. Contact: prosegrl82@aol.com