Michael Braswell taught ethics, human relations and peacemaking at East Tennessee State University. Before that he was a prison psychologist. He has published books on justice issues and the spiritual journey as well as four short story collections and two novels.
Andrew Westermann lives in St. Louis with his wife and daughter and two too many cats. His fiction explores the edges of consciousness and identity, imagining the strange futures we build when we forget what we used to be.
Mark Nuzzi lives in New Jersey, enjoying middle age and everything that comes with it. When not in his own universe, he spends time as an aquarium hobbyist, an amateur astronomer, writing stories and feeding the wildlife in the backyard.
Music, they say, gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, love to the heart, flight to the imagination, and joy to life: Basundhara baulani, the wandering mystic minstrel's songs do just this and transform the people who listen to them. They are no longer the people they once were. And the baulani is no longer a wayfarer but one of their own.
Deborah Blenkhorn is a poet, essayist, and storyteller living in the Pacific Northwest. Her work fuses memoir and imagination, and has been featured in over three dozen literary magazines and anthologies.
MJ Skinner lives in northeast Ohio. He is married with a three-year-old daughter, and another daughter on the way. His history in the helping professions (law enforcement, counseling, and social work) has provided valuable insight into pain, pleasure, and complexities of the human condition. He currently writes speculative fiction, with a particular focus on horror, dystopian, and science fiction stories.
Austin Arnold is the author of works no one has ever heard of, nor much care to. He spends his time manifesting an outlandish imagination that is overdue for therapeutic intervention. With any luck, one day his imagination will capture even just one reader’s heart the way countless others have captured his.
Marc Watson is an author, educator, and father of two residing in Michigan. He spent most of his years in Texas before making a dramatic, life-changing move to Hawaii. There, he taught at an elementary school while simultaneously finding a passion for writing on secluded beaches and in the thick of tropical forests. He became a father and moved once more to Michigan with his growing family, where he now writes under the canopy of maple trees. When his two young children allow him to, of course.