Laurie Clements Lambeth grew up in California, from Laguna Beach to Santa Ynez. After receiving a diagnosis of relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis at seventeen, she began to write poetry that investigates the individual body’s contour in context with the external world. An avid horsewoman, she rode and trained horses competitively for many years. She holds a BA from Loyola Marymount University Los Angeles, and an MFA and PhD from the University of Houston’s creative writing program, where she was awarded a Michener Fellowship and an Inprint Fellowship in Honor of Donald Barthelme. Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications, including The Paris Review, Crazyhorse, Mid-American Review, Seneca Review, Indiana Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Mid-American Review, where her essay was named Editor’s Choice in their nonfiction competition, in The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Former Reviews Editor for Disability Studies Quarterly, she is currently at work on her next poetry collection, Bright Pane, as well as a memoir.

Justin Sirois is a writer living in Baltimore, Maryland. His books include MLKNG SCKLS and the novel Falcons on the Floor (Publishing Genius) written with Iraqi refugee Haneen Alshujairy. He also runs the Understanding Campaign with Haneen and co-directs Narrow House, an small press. Justin received several individual Maryland State Art Council grants a Baker “b” grant in 2010.

Andrea White was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana but has spent most of her life in Houston, Texas. She received her undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Texas. After graduating from the University of Texas School of Law, Andrea joined the Houston law firm of Locke, Liddell & Sapp, where she became one of its first female partners.

Since retiring from the practice of law, Andrea has published four books of historical fiction. Written for middle school students, Surviving Antarctica tells the story of the Robert Scott expedition to the South Pole; Window Boy weaves the extraordinary life of Winston Churchill into a 1950’s setting; and Radiant Girl focuses on the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. In 2006, Surviving Antarctica was selected for the Bluebonnet list, and the Texas State Reading Association awarded Andrea the Golden Spur award for the best book by a Texas author. Her second novel, Window Boy, was translated into Chinese with a forward written by NBA star, Yao Ming. Most recently, she published Windows on the World, the first book in the Upcity Chronicles trilogy, about a young girl who time travels back to the Twin Towers to rescue her great grandmother.

Married for twenty-five years, Andrea and her husband, Bill, have three grown kids.

Andrew Porter is the author of the short story collection The Theory of Light and Matter, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and a novel forthcoming from Knopf in Fall 2012. His short fiction has appeared in One Story, The Threepenny Review, Epoch, The Pushcart Prize anthology and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has received a James Michener/ Copernicus Fellowship, the W.K. Rose Fellowship, and the Drake Emerging Writer Award. Currently, he’s an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Trinity University in San Antonio.