Mae Empson has a Master’s degree in English literature from Indiana University at Bloomington, and graduated with honors in English and in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she received the Robert B. House Memorial Prize in Poetry in 1995. She lives in Seattle, Washington. Recent publications appear in print in anthologies from Prime Books, Innsmouth Free Press, and Dagan Books, and on-line in The Pedestal Magazine and Cabinet des Fees. Mae Empson is a member of the Horror Writers Association, and of HorrorPNW – the Pacific Northwest chapter of HWA. Follow Mae on twitter at www.twitter.com/maeempson. Read Mae’s blog at http://maeempson.wordpress.com.

Bryan Thao Worra is the first Laotian American writer to hold a Fellowship in Literature from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the award-winning author of several books including DEMONSTRA, On The Other Side Of The Eye, BARROW, Winter Ink, Tanon Sai Jai, Touching Detonations, and The Tuk-Tuk Diaries: My Dinner With Cluster Bombs. He is the creative works editor for the Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement and the Arts and Entertainment Editor for Asian American Press. He works actively to support the work of Lao and Southeast Asian American writers across the country.

Sean has led what he calls a stereotypical writer’s life. A freakishly precocious child raised in the San Francisco Bay Area hippy-era bohemian demi-monde by drunks, he was beaten and alienated in violent inner city schools. But his grandmother’s position as head children’s librarian gave him full and unlimited access to the full collection of the Richmond Public Library, including atrocity and sex-education photos, from the age of five on. Compulsively creative from the beginning, he didn’t receive any artistic training until his mid-twenties, when he studied classical draftsmanship under Maurice Lapp. Since then, he’s been a student of everything from botanical illustration to storyboarding to bass guitar. A manual labourer since age thirteen, in his late thirties a back injury took him out of the work force. Since then, he’s been creatively productive in forms and media ranging from animation scripts to performance to gallery art, and this work has appeared everywhere from underground magazines to paleontological databases to the BBC. He lives in Berkeley, California with his beloved spouse and dogs, in a neighbourhood the news used to refer to as ‘Homicide Central.’ A friend once said, “Sean puts off all these tough guy vibes but he’s really a big marshmallow who just wants people to like each other and be polite.” Well, it’s hard to argue. That’s pretty much how it is.