Faith Adiele is the author of Meeting Faith: The Forest Journals (Norton), a memoir about being Thailand’s first black Buddhist nun; writer/narrator of My Journey Home (PBS), a documentary about growing up with her Nordic-American mother and then traveling to Nigeria as an adult to find her father and siblings; and editor of the forthcoming international anthology, Coming of Age Around the World (The New Press). Her work appears in the Seal Press anthologies Women Who Eat: A New Generation on the Glory of Food and A Woman Alone: Travel Tales from Around the Globe.  A former diversity trainer specializing in dialogues among Africana peoples, she currently teaches literary nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh and travel writing at various summer programs.

Ana Chavier Caamaño is a freelance writer, graduate student in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University and is at work on her first novel. Recent work has appeared in Cipactli, the journal of literature and art for Raza Studies at SFSU. She frequently travels to her homelands of South Dakota and the Dominican Republic to visit her families.

Judith Chalmer is the author of a book of poems, Out of History's Junk Jar (Time Being Books, 1995). She is the creator of a dance/narrative with oral histories, "Clearing Customs/ Cruzando Fronteras/ Preselenje," on the lives of immigrants in central Vermont (1999), and is author and performer of "Don't Go In There!" a one-woman comedy on racial and ethnic consciousness in central Vermont (2002). She is co-founder of a women's interracial dialog group that has met for 3 years in central Vermont. Her essays have appeared in Celebrating The Lives of Jewish Women (Haworth Press, 1997), Urban Spaghetti, RAGU: online journal of the Adult Degree Program at Vermont College and other journals.

Anita Darcel Taylor received her MFA from Bennington College and has forthcoming a collection of personal essays on mental illness, race, and identity. Her personal essays have been published in anthologies and literary journals. Currently she lives in Washington, DC.

Theater columnist for the East Bay Express in Berkeley and a regular contributor to Kitchen Sink magazine, Chicago native Lisa Drostova has been firmly ensconced in San Francisco since 1991. In her spare time she belly dances with the troupe Ultra Gypsy and glues things together.

Karen Elias became deeply committed to doing anti-racist work after attending the National Women's Studies Association Conference, Women Confront Racism, in 1981. She has taught English and Gender Studies at a variety of universities. Her work has appeared in Anima, Conditions, Escarpments, Sinister Wisdom, and Thirteenth Moon. In addition, an essay titled "Two Voices From the Front Lines," co-authored with Dr. Judith Jones, was published in the anthology Race in the College Classroom (Rutgers University Press, 2002). In 2001 she received a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant for her memoir in progress, tentatively titled White Bodies.

Now that she's retired as a professional student, Toiya Kristen Finley finds herself in the predicament of being a freelance writer and editor, stuck back home in Nashville, Tennessee. While she was still in school, she founded the journal Hapur Palate and served as its managing and fiction editor. She enjoys writing and reading in a lot of different genres. Her fiction has appeared in or is upcoming in Fortean Bureau, Mota 2002: Truth, The Paterson Literary Review, NFG, and H. P. Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror. Her nonfiction has appeared in Aim Magazine and Full Unit Hookup. She graduated from Binghamton University in 2003 with a Ph. D. in Literature and Creative Writing.

Patricia Goodwin grew up in an Italian/American neighborhood outside of Boston. She was the first in her family to finish high school and go on to college. She graduated cum laude from Salem State College, Salem, MA. In the early days of the natural foods movement, she created and taught educational programs for the East/West Foundation. She is currently a writer and a publicity agent for artists and independents. She promoted Women in the Arts, 2003, which raised funds for H.A.W.C. (Help for Abused Women and Children). In addition to many articles of non-fiction which have appeared in publications such as The Boston Herald, The Boston Globe, The Record American, American Express OnTIme, AAA Horizons, and The Salem Evening News, she has two books of poetry, Marblehead Moon and Java Love. Her novella, When Two Women Die was recently published at the Muse Online. She is currently working on two books of poetry, The Phenomenon of Day and Atlantis. The essay in this book was excerpted from her novel, Sexual Memories: Holy Days of a Woman. She lives with her husband and daughter in an historic seacoast town in Massachusetts.

Randi Gray Kristensen teaches University Writing with themes in African Diaspora culture to first-year students at the George Washington University. She holds the MFA and Ph.D. from Louisiana State University, and is completing a cross-cultural study of Black women’s writing, Rights of Passage: Maroon Novels by Black Women Writers, focusing on works by Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Maryse Conde, and Toni Cade Bambara. She is also completing a postcolonial mystery novel, Capital Crimes. She serves on the Board of the African American Women’s Resource Center, and organizes writing retreats to Jamaica, www.NaturalSoulAdventures.com.  

A native of Chicago, Mary C. Lewis has been a writer and editor for twenty-seven years. She is the author of Herstory: Black Female Rites of Passage (African American Images, 1988), a nonfiction book about teenagers. She has contributed to Sleeping with One Eye Open: Women Writers and the Art of Survival (University of Georgia Press, 1999), In Praise of Our Teachers (Beacon Press, 2003), and Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (Facts on File, 2003). "The Teach-in" is from a memoir supported by an Illinois Arts Council fellowship. She offers editorial assistance via www.e-writingcoach.com. 

Amy Meissner spent twelve years as a clothing designer in the United States and Canada before moving to Alaska in 2000 to pursue a new life and career. She recently completed an MFA in creative writing at the University of Alaska Anchorage, where she has been the assistant editor at Alaska Quarterly Review for three and a half years. She balances time as a writer and an artist, having finished her fourth illustrated book for children and soon to begin a fifth and sixth with publishers in the U.S. and Canada. Excerpts from her memoir collection, A Quick Turn of Soil, have been published in the literary magazine Crazyhorse and in the anthology Far From Home (Seal Press, 2004). "Blonde," published here, is a third piece from this collection.

Colleen Nakamoto lives in the San Francisco Bay area, and was a Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellow of PEN Center USA West. Her work has appeared in ONTHEBUS, Spillway, Rattle and Moving Pictures: Nine Los Angeles Poets.

Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu is a journalist for Africana.com, and a technology columnist for the Chicago Sun-Time's sister paper, The Star (the column is called Nnedi on the Net). She received her bachelor's degree in English/Rhetoric from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and her journalism master's degree from Michigan State University. She is currently working on her PhD in English at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She recently won third place in the Hurston/Wright Awards for her story "Amphibious Green". She received honorable mention in The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror (14th Ed). Okorafor-Mbachu's short story, "Windseekers", was also a finalists in the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest. She also was chosen to present her master's thesis paper, "Virtual Women: Female Characters in Video Games", at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication 2001 convention.

Okorafor-Mbachu has also previously been published in USAToday.com, Pointcast.com, Essence.com and the Student Advantage Network Online. Her short stories appeared in the following literary journals: The Women's International Network Magazine, Margin: Exploring Modern Magical Realism, Moondance Magazine, Shag, Umoja, Strange Horizons and The Thirteenth Floor. In 2001, "Crossroads", a short story, was published in The Witching Hour Anthology by Silver Lake Publishing.

Wendy Rose is the author of several volumes of poetry, including Now Poof She Is Gone, The Halfbreed Chronicles, and Bone Dance.

Esmeralda Santiago is the author of the memoirs When I was Puerto Rican, Almost a Woman, and The Turkish Lover. She has also written a novel, América’s Dream, and has co-edited two literary anthologies featuring Latino writers. Her books are required reading in schools and universities throughout the United States and in Puerto Rico. Ms. Santiago wrote the screenplay for the PBS Masterpiece Theatre film of Almost a Woman, which won a Peabody Award. Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in major newspapers, including The New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor, as well as in mass-market magazines. She has also been a guest commentator on National Public Radio. In addition to her literary achievements, Ms. Santiago has designed and developed community-based programs for adolescents, and was a founder of a shelter for battered women and their children. Ms. Santiago serves on the boards of organizations devoted to the arts and literature, and is an impassioned spokesperson for supporting the artistic development of young people. She graduated from Harvard University, earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College and is the recipient of three honorary degrees.

Sejal Shah is a fiction writer, poet, essayist, and teacher of writing. She is the 2004-5 Writer-in-Residence and CSMP Scholar at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. Previously she taught creative writing at Mount Holyoke College and at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she earned her MFA. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and fellowships from the New York State Council for the Arts (1995) and Blue Mountain Center (2001). Her writing has appeared in many journals including The Massachusetts Review (Fall 2004, The Cultural Politics of Food, guest edited by Anita Mannur), Indiana Review (Summer 2004, Between Cultures), Pleiades, Meridians, The Asian Pacific American Journal, Hanging Loose, Catamaran, and the anthology, Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America. Currently, she is completing a collection of short stories, Ithaca Is Never Far, and a series of nonfiction essays, which explore South Asian diasporic identity. You can reach her at sejalshah1019@yahoo.com.

Devorah Stone's passion for art led the way to a visual arts degree from the University of Victoria. Her true love for writing surfaced later, after marriage and three children. She has published articles on bread baking, donuts, buffalo meat, online confession booths, dancing hamsters, penguins, snow flakes, women Rabbis, weight lifting, high school graduation, Pokemons and life on other planets. A former Web reviewer for the Encyclopedia Britannica online guide, her articles, fiction and reviews have been widely published in InscriptionsMagazine, Verbatimag, Folksonline, Highlights for Children, Chatelaine, Papyrus magazine, Amateur Chef and Straight Goods, among others. She is the host of the Historical Fiction Forum.

R. Hong-An Truong is the Documentary Arts Educator at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. She is a photographer and writer who is actively working on issues that involve youth, education, and racism. Her work includes coordinating youth programs that use photography, audio production, and writing as a lens for young people to learn about community issues, media activism, and self-representation. Truong's photographic work has been included in exhibits organized by Chambers Fine Art Gallery in New York, the Godwin-Ternbach Museum at Queens College, and the International Center of Photography among others. In 2002, she was awarded an artist-in-residency at both the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and at the Visual Studies Workshop, both in New York. She is the co-editor of a special issue of Southern Exposure on Asians in the South, which will be published in 2005.

B. Lois Wadas is a Director, Playwright, Poet and Performance Artist based in NYC. Her first full-length play, "Woman-to-Woman", was done, Off-Broadway in New York City. She re-mounted and directed this play in Harlem at The Harlem Theatre Company. She twice moderated "A Round Table of Women Writers" aired on Manhattan Cable Network Television in NYC. Lois is an active member of The International Women Writers Guild. Her work has been widely published here and in Canada. Her work has also been featured online at KUMA, LiterateNubian, and Timbuktu. As a Psychotherapist, Lois uses the creative process psycho dynamically. She conducts workshops and discussion groups in NYC, California and Washington DC. Lois is committed to gender, women of color and artist addressing issues of life. She developed and conducts "The Good Breast", and "Ms Right", culturally and gender issue, sensitive relationship workshops. As an Adjunct Professor, Lois Directed Ntozake Shange’s "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow is Enuf" at SUNY Stony Brook. She recently Produced and Directed "Woman to Woman" at the Harlem Theatre Co. in NYC, she will mount WomenWording, a choreopoem March ’04. In February ’02, Lois appeared on HBO in the Vagina Monologues. She also appeared on Queens Public Television this past September in Autumn Magic commemorating 9-11. She is in private practice in NYC

Traise Yamamoto is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body, published by the University of California Press (1999). Her essays, poems and fiction have been published in Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Poets, Premonitions The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, The New Republic, signs, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere.  

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