Joanna Ruocco is a prize-winning American author and co-editor of the fiction journal Birkensnake. In 2013, she received the Pushcart Prize for her story "If the Man Took” and is also winner of the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. Ruocco received her MFA at Brown, and a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Denver. Her most recent novel is Dan, published by Dorothy, A Publishing Project. She also serves as Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at Wake Forest University. Ruocco has also published romance novels under the pseudonyms Toni Jones and Alessandra Shahbaz. (from Wikipedia)

Lesley C. Weston loves character driven stories, loves words more than food. Her stories have or will appear in Smokelong Quarterly, Gator Springs Gazette, Flashfiction.net, Alien Skin, UR Paranormal, Ars Medica, and Pisgah Review, among others.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. Norman Lock has written novels, short fiction, and poetry as well as stage plays, dramas for German radio, a film for The American Film Institute, and scenarios for video-art installations. His plays have been produced in the U.S., Germany, at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival, and in Turkey. His work has been translated into Dutch, German, Spanish, Turkish, and Japanese. He received the Aga Kahn Prize, given by The Paris Review, the Literary Fiction Prize, given by The Dactyl Foundation of the Arts & Humanities, fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. (source: http://www.normanlock.com/)

Carol Novack's fictions, fusions, and poems may be found in numerous journals, including American Letters & Commentary, Caketrain, Drunken Boat, Diagram, Exquisite Corpse, Fiction International, Gargoyle, Journal of Experimental Literature, La Petite Zine, LIT, Mississippi Review online, Notre Dame Review & Word Riot. Anthologies include The Penguin Book of Australian Poets, Diagram III, and The &Now Awards: The Best Innovative Writing. She's the publisher of the multi-media e-journal Mad Hatters' Review, author of a poetry chapbook, and an erstwhile Australian Arts Council grant recipient. Ms. Novack is also a former criminal and constitutional attorney in NYC, and has a Master's in Social Work (community organizing). She recently established a non-profit arts organization and intends to operate a retreat in her mountain home in Western North Carolina. Her beautifully illustrated collection of fictions, fusions, and poems, Giraffes in Hiding: The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack, (Spuyten Duyvil Press) was published in Fall, 2010. Hugh Fox has called "Giraffes": THE most seductive, original, impacting work I have seen for years. A fascinating combination of Kerouacian street-talk plus a trip through the museum of Modern Art in Chicago, plus a nod-off to Kosty's furthest out experimentalism. Magnifique! She has the literary equivalent of perfect pitch, like those musicians who can specify the hertz of birds and burps. Uncanny tympani! — Tom Bradley. "Carol Novacks Giraffes in Hiding mirrors our weltanschauung by using its own language against it or by using its own language to pry open the circus hidden within it. If we say the world is insane or we say the world is a manic whirl, Novack embraces manic insanity with a great hug of laughter. She flings images, characters, ideas, and language around until they all, finally losing, - no, abandoning - their moorings, collide, crash, ka-bang one into another creating nuclear reactions of the non-sense that is even Emily Dickinsons divine sense, although Novack would certainly hurl those two words (and that idea) against each other until they radiated. To read this book is to bring the giraffes out of hiding!" — Martin Nakell In Giraffes in Hiding Carol Novack proves once again that she is the all-time champion of wild, wigged out, original prose/ poetry and poetic prose. The first full-length collection of her work, subtitled The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack, is a feast of fusions, inventions, myths, dreams, forms, and possibilities. Theres no one like Novack, and here she is at her best as she chases her ontological tail round and round the intelligible, unknown worlds of her subconscious (and ours). Think Alice in Wonderland on acid simultaneously dancing with Tristan Tzara, Rimbaud, Oedipus, Pandora, Gertrude Stein, Proust, Kerouac, and that weird kid next door who ate all of the heads off your Barbie Dolls and youll begin to get a feel for what shes up to. — Mary Mackey Carol Novack is a conundrum to literary editors whose ideas of poetry and fiction as forms are rigid. To such editors, Novack might say, as one of her personae does, Your imagination has closed walls. The best term for Novacks typical literary form flash fiction qua prose poem qua fusionis Novacks own, invention. Her eloquent inventions are witty, lyrical, and new, even as they reinvent the themes of family, myth, art, and self. The crux of Novacks art is her imaginative power to bring alternate realities to vibrant life. — Larissa Shmailo Shes great at creating a Freudian cage, & trapping the reader in it. 'Tis very powerful. —Rae Desmond Jones See her blog, http://carolnovack.blogspot.com for prior publication details, & amazon.com for customer review/s. Other reviews are accessible via the blog. Order at amazon.com.

Michael Jay Katz is a theoretical biologist. He earned his BA from Harvard University and then gained his MD and a PhD at Case Western Reserve University. He has taught anatomy and physical diagnosis in the medical school of Case Western Reserve University for thirty years. Michael has written many books, professional papers, and essays. He is a contributing editor for Taber’s Medical Dictionary. His currently an Associate Professor of Bio-Architectonics at Case Western Reserve University in the Department of Anatomy.

Founded in 2003, Caketrain is a literary journal and press based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Their interest is in bringing readers the very best in contemporary creative writing. Editors: Amanda Raczkowski and Joseph Reed.