Beau Denton recently graduated from the University of North Florida and is now living in Los Angeles, looking at the future and trying to put words together.

Nancy Gessnerwas born in Santa Cruz, California and grew up in the Ozarks. By the time she was cast in her first play on her twenty-first birthday, she was living in Arizona, where she directed and acted in local productions for more than a decade. Since moving to New York in 1999, she has produced, directed and starred in a one-woman play, and appeared onstage as a singer. In recent years, she has added new rhythms to her artistic voice by studying drawing at the Art Students League of New York, and by writing. She has found inspiration in the Heather Gardens at the Cloisters, on Neptune Beach, and dancing in the dining room with her husband Charlie. They live on Long Island.

Thomas Karst lives in Jacksonville Florida and studies English and Anthropology at the University of North Florida. He and his wife have recently been enjoying a new son, changing diapers, and losing sleep (which is why he is writing this in the third person). I find inspiration for fiction in the stories which constitute my life and the lives of those I encounter. Life is a story – it ebbs and flows. And I find myself drifting through it, swimming in words.

Themba Mabona was born and bred in Switzerland. She studied Sociology & Anthropology
at the U.of Zurich, Sociology at Francis College, and received her B.A. from Knox College and M.A. from the U. of Chicago. She spent 4 months in Berlin with a young Internet Startup doing marketing, 9 months in Cape Town doing Development Cooperation and interviewing both Youth and disadvantaged people from an alternative economy network (talent exchange).
     Presently she lives in Lucerne, waiting to land a job in journalism. She is most interested
in contemporary literature from Switzerland, USA, South Africa, as well as Anthropology, studying alternative economics and anarchism (David Graeber). Other hobbies are running and badminton. Favourite reading: P. Roth, D. DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, F. Pessoa, U. K. LeGuin, I. Calvino, S. Bellow, Hugo Loetscher, Terry Eagleton, Nicholas Mosley, Max Frisch, Zakes Mda. Mabona has a blog in German & English: http://themzini.wordpress.com

Laura Murren currently attends Valdosta State University and is majoring in Spanish. She is from Snellville, Georgia, a town in the suburbs of Atlanta, and comes from a family of four kids (two brothers, one sister). She enjoys other types of art including painting, film and music. She plays guitar and sings, and paints mainly with acrylic and oil. As a hobby she likes to play around with video. In 2004 Murren placed 2nd in a national PSA contest put on by Voltzwagon called “Fasten your seatbelt…Go far.” In 2008 at VSU she also placed 2nd in their centennial art competition. Murren volunteers at Valdosta Tech, teaching English as a second language once a week. Her graduation date is set for May 2010 and after that she plan to go overseas to teach English in China or perhaps in South America.

Klemen Pisk (born July 31, 1973 in Kranj, Slovenia) is a contemporary Slovene poet, writer, translator and musician. Between 2006 and 2009 he lived in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. In 1998 he published his first book, a collection of poems entitled, Labas Vakaras, which was nominated for book of the year in Slovenia. His second poetry book Visoko in nagubano praočelo (High and Wrinkled Primordial Substance) was published in 2000, and Mojster v spovednici (Master in the Confessional Box) in 2002. Klemen Pisk, who speaks several foreign languages, also translates Polish and Lithuanian texts. From Polish he has translated the dramas by Pope John Paul II and his Roman Triptych, he also edited an extensive selection of Czesław Miłosz's poetry Zvonovi pozimi (The Bells in Winter). As a singer, guitarist and the author of most songs he sings, Pisk has recorded two albums with his acoustic jazz group Žabjak bend and performed all over Slovenia and also abroad -- in Frankfurt, Warsaw, Cracow, Gdańsk, Łódź, Prague, Vilnius, Helsinki, Dubrovnik, Sarajevo etc. Pisk’s poetry and prose has been translated into many foreign languages and published in Austrian, Bosnian, Czech, Polish and Finnish literary magazines. In 2005 his book Tych kilka słów (These Few Words) was translated into Polish by Marcin Mielczarek. Klemen Pisk's most recent book Pihalec (The Blower) is a selection of humoristic short stories and was published at the most respectful Slovene publishing house, Nova revija. From this book is also the story Vilnius.
     Translator: Shay Wood is a Master’s student in History at the University of Kansas. He works on the history of urban life, travel, and sports in the former Yugoslavia. During the 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 academic years he received a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship to study Slovene. He received his BA in History at Utah State University in 2006.

Sarah Prevatt has an MFA from the University of Central Florida and currently teaches creating writing in the community with UCF’s Literary Arts Partnership. Recent work has appeared in Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art and Oak Bend Review.

Sean Thompson is a new author who has been seriously working at, and developing his writing for about three years. He graduated from UNF in 2008 with a Bachelor’s in English and despite his hopes is still trying to find a job willing to make use of his particular skills. He has moved around a lot for various reasons and experienced his fair share of a multitude of different people and personalities and tends to day dream about “what if” scenarios. Once he started putting ideas onto paper he realized
he’d been writing stories most of his life sans the paper. He enjoys writing and hopes to continue to do it for a long time to come, and maybe eventually make some money off of it.

Christine Utz was born in Miami, Florida and graduated from the University of North Florida in 2008. She is currently working on her Masters thesis in fiction at Adelphi University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.