Harold Taw's debut novel, Adventures of the Karaoke King (AmazonEncore 2011), is a karaoke grail quest about transplanted people from around the globe who keep falling just short of their dreams.  His second novel, Saturday's Child, follows an adolescent girl's journey from the Southeast Asian countryside to the city during politically tumultuous times. Harold's screenplay Dog Park has been recognized in international film festivals and competitions, his personal essay on why he feeds monkeys was broadcast on NPR's This I Believe, and he is currently collaborating on a musical. 

Nora Wendl is a writer and professor of architecture whose work (built and written) is influenced by the processes, products, history and discourse of the (silent) built and made things around us-particularly architecture. A native of Nebraska, she studied at Iowa State University and was 2005 Pearl Hogrefe Fellow in Creative Writing. For the Jack Straw Writers Program, she is collaborating with the late Dr. Edith Farnsworth to write a more immediate and poetic account of living in the Mies van der Rohe-designed Farnsworth House. She lives in Portland, Oregon and teaches at Portland State University Department of Architecture.

Ann Teplick is a Seattle poet, playwright, and prose writer, with an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College. For eighteen years she's written with youth in schools, juvenile detention centers, psychiatric hospitals and literary non-profits. Her work has appeared in Crab Creek Review, Drash, Chrysanthemum, Hunger Mountain, and others. Her plays have been showcased in Washington, Oregon, and Nova Scotia. In 2010 she received funding from Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs and 4Culture for a collection of poetry The Beauty of a Beet, Poems from the Bedside. In 2011 she will be a fellow at Hedgebrook.

Maritess Zurbano has been a practicing magician for 19 years, has competed internationally and performed around the world. Her memoir-based play, Rites of Enchantment, has won entry into the New York International Fringe Festival and the NYC Ars Nova Theater Festival. Her short stories have been published in The Chicago Reader as well as the literary magazine Snowbound. She is a contributor to Magic Magazine and has been profiled by Newsday, Lifetime Television, The BBC News, Epoch Times, and The Village Voice, providing commentary on magic and the occult. In 2010 she received a Washington State Artist Trust Grant. She has work forthcoming from the literary journal, Crab Creek Review.

Anne McDuffie writes essays, poetry and book reviews. Her work has appeared in Colorado Review, Crab Creek Review, A River and Sound Review, Rattle, Poetry International, American Book Review, and the anthology Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction (Norton, 2005). She received her MFA in 2007 from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.

Don Fels is a visual artist and writer. For the past twenty-five years he has followed the trade in commodities around the world. People have always exchanged goods, and in the process have forever swapped stories, traded hopes and ideas. He is currently at work on a graphic non-fiction book, Placing Color, which looks at the rather incredible history of the mordant alum. His book Water's Edge, about a year he spent as artist in residence at a decommissioned steel plant in Southern Italy, is being readied for publication.

Larissa Min is a fiction and non-fiction writer, photographer, linguaphile and fallen urbanite. She's currently working on "Breaking English," a creative non-fiction account of her family's migration from Korea to Brazil and later the US as a lens through which to examine the experiences of global migration, displacement and remembering. She has received a City Artist award from the Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, a 2010 GAP grant from Artist Trust, and the James Hall Prize for Fiction.

Nassim Assefi is a novelist and global women's health specialist. Author of Aria (Harcourt and 5 foreign publishers) and forthcoming Say I Am You, medical advisor to ZocDoc, practicing physician at Country Doctor Community Health Clinics, TED Global Fellow and TEDxRainier curator, Assefi's most accurate description may be that of thrillionaire. Past incarnations include: academic at UW Medical School, humanitarian aid worker (and underground salsa dance teacher) in Kabul, aspiring musician in Havana, and writer in Istanbul. She serves on advisory boards for Hedgebrook, Whit Press, and the Guttmacher Institute. She was recently honored by the Feminist Press as one of the top 40 feminists under 40.

Annette Spaulding-Convy's full length collection, In Broken Latin, will be published by the University of Arkansas Press (Spring 2012) as a finalist for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, In The Convent We Become Clouds, won the 2006 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Contest and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Crab Orchard Review and in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, among others. She is Co-Editor of the literary journal Crab Creek Review, and is Co-Founder of Two Sylvias Press, which will publish the first eBook anthology of contemporary women's poetry, Fire On Her Tongue, later this year.

Robert Lamirande is a writer and musician whose work has appeared in Flashquake, The Splinter Generation, Bricolage, and several others. He has performed with Seattle bands Randal Cobb and Sound of Bagheera, and his music has appeared in the full-length feature film, The Curse of Duncan Carbuncle. He is currently employed as a writer by Microsoft, for whom he scribes 140 characters at a time.

Katharine Whitcomb is the author of a collection of poems, Saints of South Dakota & Other Poems, which was chosen by Lucia Perillo as the winner of the 2000 Bluestem Award and published by Bluestem Press, and two poetry chapbooks: Hosannas (Parallel Press, 1999) and Lamp of Letters (Floating Bridge Press, 2009), winner of the 2009 Floating Bridge Chapbook Award. Her poetry awards include a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, a Loft-McKnight Award, a Writing Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Halls Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She received an AWP Fellowship in Poetry to the Prague Summer Seminars at Charles University in the Czech Republic. She has had work published in many journals and anthologies, including Making Poems and Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos. She lives in Ellensburg, WA, where she is Coordinator of the Writing Specialization English Major at Central Washington University.

Debra Jarvis works as a per diem chaplain at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. She is the author of It's Not about the Hair: And Other Certainties of Life & Cancer (Sasquatch, 2007), an account of her time with cancer as she continues to work as an oncology chaplain. Her book The Journey Through AIDS: A Guide For Loved Ones and Caregivers (Lion, 1992) has been used nation-wide as a training book for AIDS caregivers. It features interviews with caregivers, medical personnel and people living with AIDS. Her second book, HIV Positive, Living With AIDS (Lion, 1990), is written for those who are HIV positive and deals with the spiritual issues around AIDS.  Her first book, Take It Again-From The Top (Lion, 1986) is a memoir of her faith journey. She lectures at the University of Washington medical school and Bastyr University on medicine and spirituality. She was ordained in the United Church of Christ in 1989.