Erin Watson is a Southern person living in Chicago. Her poems appear in Anthology of Chicago and in the self-published chapbooks No Experiences, Instax Winter, and Nickels. Her poetry criticism appears on the Volta Blog. She was a finalist for...  read

Christa Desir writes contemporary fiction for young adults. Her novels include Fault Line and Bleed Like Me and the forthcoming Other Broken Things and Love Blind. She lives with her husband, three children, and overly-enthusiastic dog outside of Chicago. She...  read

Mary Lorenz writes stories for your enjoyment and her desperate need for attention. By day, she works in public relations as a corporate communications manager, which means...her guess is as good as yours. Mary has performed at Story Club, Essay...  read

Emily Nordling likes history, revolution, and magic (in pretty much any combination). She writes speculative fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, and is a blogger for Tor.com. She received her MA in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where she recently...  read

K.B. Jensen is an author and journalist. Painting With Fire, an artistic murder mystery, was her debut novel last year and has been a bestseller on Amazon. She is currently finishing a second book, tentatively titled A Storm of Stories,...  read

Hannah Gamble is the 2015 winner of the Neil Postman award for metaphor from Rattle magazine. She will be giving talks this summer at the Chicago Art Institute and the 2015 Printer's Ball, and will have new poems out in...  read

Jenny Drai is the author of Letters to Quince (winner of the Deerbird Novella Prize from Artistically Declined Press), and two poetry chapbooks: The New Sorrow Is Less Than the Old Sorrow (Black Lawrence Press) and :Body Wolf: (Horse Less...  read

Jack M Silverstein is a staff writer for Chicago Daily Law Bulletin. He enjoys meeting new people, so start a conversation with him @readjack. Please join Jack and all our great readers on Tuesday, May 5, 2015, upstairs at Hopleaf...  read

Melissa Franic is a writer and educator born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago to an Italian-American mother and a Yugoslavian-born father. She holds a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Creative Writing from Goddard College, as well as...  read

Maggie Kast is the author of The Crack between the Worlds: a dancer's memoir of loss, faith and family, published by Wipf and Stock. Her first novel, A Free, Unsullied Land, is forthcoming from Fomite Press in autumn 2015. "The...  read