JOAN SCHENKAR has been called "America's most original female contemporary playwright." TRULY WILDE, her biography of Oscar's interesting niece Dolly Wilde, was hailed as "a revelation, the great story of a life and of the creation of modern culture." THE TALENTED MISS HIGHSMITH has already been acclaimed as the "definitive" Highsmith biography. As a child actor in Seattle, Schenkar made many television and stage appearances (one of them was with Everett Edward Horton) and was a touring member of the corps de ballet of The Cornish Ballet Company. She wrote her first play while living in The Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. The recipient of more than forty grants, fellowships, and awards for her "comedies of menace" (including seven National Endowment for the Arts grants), Schenkar has been reviewed in every major (and many minor) newspaper in the English-speaking theatre world. She has been playwright-in-residence in universities, artists' colonies, as well as in such experimental theatre companies as Joseph Chaikin’s Winter Project, The Polish Laboratory Theatre, and The Minnesota Opera New Music Theatre Ensemble. She is an alumna of New Dramatists, and a current member of The Authors Guild, Societe des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques, PEN, The Dramatists’ Guild, and The Brontë Society. She was founder and artistic director of Force Majeure Productions in New York City. The London theatre company, SIGNS OF LIFE THEATRE, was named after her play and a road in Pownal, Vermont has been named after her. She has an ABD in English and American literature and aesthetics. Her published plays include one of the most widely-produced and studied plays in the history of theatre written by women, SIGNS OF LIFE. She has had more than five hundred productions of her work on stage, radio, and video, including the following plays: CABIN FEVER, SIGNS OF LIFE, THE LODGER, BUCKS AND DOES, MR. MONSTER, THE LAST OF HITLER, BETWEEN THE ACTS, HUNTING DOWN THE SEXES, FULFILLING KOCH’S POSTULATE, FAMILY PRIDE IN THE 50’s, FIRE IN THE FUTURE, THE UNIVERSAL WOLF, BURNING DESIRES. Feature articles about JOAN SCHENKAR’s work have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times,The Village Voice, The Washington Post, The Denver Post, and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She is the subject of articles and interviews in such scholarly and theatrical journals as: TDR, Theatre Journal, PAJ, Modern Drama, Women and Performance, Michigan Quarterly Review, Studies in American Drama, Alternatives Theatrales, and Feminist Re-visions. Her short stories have been published in several anthologies. SIGNS OF LIFE: Six Comedies of Menace, a collection of her plays, was published in 1998 and was a Wesleyan University Press best-seller. TRULY WILDE: the unsettling story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar’s unusual niece was published by Basic Books/​Perseus in New York, Virago Press/​Little Brown in London and RandomHouse/​ Mondadori in Barcelona in 2000 and 2001 and was a finalist for The Lamda Literary Award. Her latest work –- a literary biography of Patricia Highsmith, THE TALENTED MISS HIGHSMITH: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith—has just been published by St Martin's Press (New York), and will be published by Diogenes Verlag (Zurich), and Circe Press (Barcelona) in 2010. JOAN SCHENKAR lives and writes in Paris and Greenwich Village.

Laurie Weeks is a writer, performer, artist and teacher. Her critically acclaimed first novel, Zipper Mouth, was published by The Feminist Press in 2011 and was honored with the International Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Debut Novel, and was among five shortlisted for Triangle Publishing’s Edmund White Award for Best Debut Novel. Zipper Mouth appeared on numerous “Most Notable” and “Top 10” book lists for 2011 and 2012, and a German edition is forthcoming. A Turkish translation appeared in 2015. A portion of this novel appeared in 2008 in Dave Eggers' yearly anthology, The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Weeks is among the names shouted-out in Le Tigre’s hit single, Hot Topic, and in 1999 she toured the country with Sister Spit, an assemblage of post-punk performers led by Michelle Tea. Weeks was a contributing screenwriter on the film Boys Don’t Cry. Her fiction, essays, interviews and collaborations with visual artists have appeared in the US and Europe in, to name a few: Pussy Riot! A Punk Prayer for Freedom; Vice; Whitney Biennial 2012; Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors; The Baffler; Index; Movement Research Performance Journal; LA Weekly; Fetish: An Anthology of Fetish Fiction; FELIX: A Journal of Media Arts and Communication; Art on Paper; Nobodaddies; and numerous blogs. Weeks’ story Debbie’s Barium Swallow is featured in Semiotext(e)’s award-winning bestseller The New Fuck You: An Anthology of Lesbian Writing, a lineup of work that includes Sapphire and Dodie Bellamy. Edited by Eileen Myles and Liz Kotz in 1996, TNFU is now in its fourth printing. Another popular piece, Nacho From The Edge, is printed in Cookin’ With Honey: What Literary Lesbians Eat, edited by Amy Scholder for Firebrand Books. Weeks has read and performed widely in downtown NYC venues including P.S. 122, The Kitchen, Pyramid Club, LaMama and Jackie 60. In 2006 Weeks directed the original incarnation of Hell, an opera by Eileen Myles and composer Michael Webster, staged in Tijuana, Mexico, L.A. (The Red Cap) and St. Mark’s Poetry Project. She also wrote, directed, and performed in Young Skulls II, a short play loosely based on a true-crime murder by teenage lesbian thrill-killers, which was staged at the WOW Café in NY and in San Francisco at The Lab. The piece originated from Summer of Bad Plays, a long-running series produced irregularly in downtown nightclubs and lofts, co-founded by Weeks in collaboration with a loose collective that includes legendary filmmaker Charles Atlas and performance artists Anne Iobst and Lucy Sexton of “DanceNoise,” Tom Murrin, aka “The Alien Comic,” Hapi Phace, Mike Iveson and David Ilku, to name but a few. In addition to live performance, Weeks has appeared in several videos by Cecilia Dougherty; most notably she played the role of Lance Loud in Dougherty’s feature-length video Gone, a reinterpretation of the 70s PBS reality show An American Family. She was also the subject of a 1998 video portrait by Dougherty. She was the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts literary grant, and was awarded a 7-month fellowship to the Fine Arts Workshop in Provincetown, MA. She has also attended residencies at The Edward Albee Foundation on Montauk, Long Island, and the Millay Colony. She received her M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University, where she studied under cultural anthropologist Michael Taussig. Her focus was literature, social engineering, and the use of language as an instrument of violence against bodies and the imagination. She has been a panelist and presenter at numerous academic conferences—among them Columbia, Brown, Brandeis and Kent State Universities as well as the University of California at San Diego.

Rebecca Brown’s diverse oeuvre contains collections of essays and short stories, a fictionalized autobiography, a modern bestiary, a memoir in the guise of a medical dictionary, a libretto for a dance opera, a play, and various kinds of fantasy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_...

Marilyn Hacker is an American poet, translator, critic, and professor of English. Her books of poetry include Presentation Piece (1974), which won the National Book Award, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986), and Going Back to the River (1990). In 2009, Hacker won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Étienne, which also garnered the first Robert Fagles Translation Prize from the National Poetry Series. In 2010, she received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. She was shortlisted for the 2013 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for her translation of Tales of A Severed Head by Rachida Madani.

Sapphire the Author. Sapphire is the author of Push, American Dreams, The Kid, and Black Wings & Blind Angels. Push: A novel, won the Book-of-the-Month Club’s Stephen Crane award for First Fiction, the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s First Novelist Award, and in Great Britain, the Mind Book of the Year Award. Named by the Village Voice and Time Out New York as one of the top ten books of 1996, Push was nominated for an NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Work of Fiction. Push was adapted into the Oscar winning film, Precious. Sapphire’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Spin, and Bomb. In February of 2007 Arizona State University presented PUSHing Boundaries, PUSHing Art: A Symposium on the Works of Sapphire. Sapphire's poetry has appeared in the following anthologies: Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Grabbed: Poets & Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment & Healing, and New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent. Sapphire’s work has been translated into over a dozen languages and has been adapted for stage in the United States and Europe. For more information, visit: https://linktr.ee/sapphiretheauthor

Laura Flanders is a British-born US-based journalist who presents the current events show GRITtv, broadcast weekdays on Link and Free Speech TV. She has written for The Nation, In These Times, The Progressive and Ms. Magazine, and has contributed op-ed pieces to the San Francisco Chronicle. Flanders hosted the weekday radio show Your Call on KALW, before starting the Saturday/Sunday evening Laura Flanders Show on Air America Radio in 2004. It became the weekly one-hour Radio Nation in 2007. She was founding director of the women's desk at the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), and for a decade produced and hosted CounterSpin, FAIR's syndicated radio program. Flanders has published four books: Blue Grit: True Democrats Take Back Politics from the Politicians (2007); Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species (2004), a study of the women in George W. Bush's cabinet; and a collection of essays, Real Majority, Media Minority: The Cost of Sidelining Women in Reporting (1997). She edited The W Effect: Sexual Politics in the Age of Bush (2004). Her TV appearances include Lou Dobbs Tonight, The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity and Colmes, Washington Journal, Donahue, Good Morning America, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, The Ed Show, Real Time with Bill Maher, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation TV news discussion program counterSpin (not to be confused with the FAIR show of the same name). Flanders has described herself as a "liberal, lefty person." She is the daughter of the British comic songwriter and broadcaster Michael Flanders and his wife Claudia Cockburn. The brothers Alexander, Andrew and Patrick Cockburn all journalists, are her uncles. Her sister is Stephanie Flanders, a BBC journalist.

Christina Sunley was born in New York City, raised on Long Island, and has lived for the past twenty years in the San Francisco Bay Area. She attended Wesleyan University, got a BFA in Film from New York University, and received her Masters in English/Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She currently works fulltime in the nonprofit sector. Christina grew up hearing stories about her Icelandic relatives and their journey to North America, following the 1875 volcanic eruption that decimated much of Iceland's farmland. To write The Tricking of Freya, she spent several years researching Icelandic history, mythology, and genealogy, including three trips to Iceland and a stint as writer-in-residence at Klaustrið (The Monastery), a stone farmhouse in a remote area, near where her grandfather had lived. Christina’s short fiction has appeared in a variety of literary journals. The Tricking of Freya is her first novel.