Brandi M. Spaethe recently graduated from Fresno State with an M.F.A. in poetry. She’s worked for The Normal School: A Literary Magazine, The Philip Levine Prize in Poetry, and currently interns at Poets & Writers in Los Angeles. Her poems have appeared in CRATE, Off the Rocks: An GLBT Anthology, American Athenaeum, and Slipstream. Her chapbook, To You Who Wants In, was released in December 2012. She plans to continue working with literary nonprofits in Los Angeles and writing about the queer community.
Originally hailing from rural Nova Scotia, Meg Leitold is a queer femme researcher, psychotherapist, and dilettante currently based in Toronto. A graduate of Concordia University’s Simone de Beauvoir Institute in Montreal, her writing has been published in several zines, art installations, and journals, including No More Potlucks, Historiae, and Subversions. She is currently writing a textbook on gender equity for junior high school students. When her red tips are not clicking away at her computer keyboard, Meg can be found burning up the dance floor, taking a bath, or belting out Rihanna covers at drop-in choir.
Dakota Shain Byrd was born in Dallas Texas and grew up all over the US. He and Skyeler–the main character in his novel The Black Night Rave–are both gay and Third Culture Kids, having fathers in the Marines. While he is an unpublished novelist, he has published poetry, short stories, novel excerpts and photography, has written for The Dallas Voice and interned for them. He’s single also, guys 22-26. Holly Black sent him a hand written letter with a chapter critique, so he takes that as a sign that he’s going to be big–you should too.
Carlyle Nuera is an artist, designer and writer from Los Angeles, CA. He graduated from Otis College of Art and Design in May 2010, having studied both fashion design and product design. Since October 2010, he’s been working at his dream job as a Barbie designer at Mattel, Inc. In January 2013, Carlyle participated in VONA/Voices, a writing workshop for writers of color. He was one of three writers at the workshop to receive the Manuel G. Flores Scholarship from PAWA, Inc. (Philippine American Writers and Artists). He’s currently working on a memoir, tentatively titled “Freak Like Me”.
Laura Chandra is a born and raised Bostonian without an accent. She is in the process of completing her first full length young adult manuscript about a South Asian/American girl who thinks she is the anti-christ. Outside of writing, Laura spends her time trying hard not to waste her Masters degree in financial planning while pouring money into prolonging her dog’s life. She will trade financial advice for writing tips.
SJ Sindu is a writer and activist who focuses on traditionally silenced voices—the immigrant, the poor, the queer, the female-bodied, the non-Christian, the non-white. Sindu has an MA in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and is an incoming Ph.D. student in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Sindu is a fan of fluidity, and likes to blend genres and genders. Sindu’s creative writing has appeared in Brevity, Water~Stone Review, Harpur Palate, The MacGuffin, Sinister Wisdom, and elsewhere. Currently Sindu is dividing time between two projects: a novel about a Sri Lankan American lesbian in a marriage of convenience, and a collection of nonfiction essays exploring issues of war and gender.
Gillian Chisom I am currently pursuing a PhD in History at the University of California, Berkeley. Though I write urban fantasy rather than historical fiction, my scholarly and fictional writings both display my passion for women’s voices and stories. A lifelong fantasy reader, during the last few years I have wrestled with the genre’s flaws and possibilities, and have become committed to writing stories with queer teen girls at their centers. When I’m not reading seventeenth-century witch trials or writing about lesbians dealing with supernatural mayhem, I like to watch TV and make my own clothes (sometimes at the same time).
Lee Wheaton is a genderqueer introvert who lives in Oakland, California. Raised in New England and molded into an adult by New York City, Lee combines natural imagery and Yankee sensibility with reflections on complex familial and queer relationships in non-fictionmprose. Lee, a former encyclopedia editor, continues to work in online reference publishing and spends free time attempting to bring the country into the city through cooking, urban farming, rock climbing, and two-stepping.
A native of Portland, Oregon, Audrey Coulthurst now lives in Austin, Texas, despite her passionate hatred of hot weather. She received an MS in Writing (Book Publishing) from Portland State University in 2008 and is completing the final edits on her YA fantasy about a princess who falls in love with her fiancé’s sister. Audrey spends most of her time cackling gleefully at her computer while crafting elaborate euphemisms and disturbing metaphors. However, she can also be found drinking too much tea at her day job, telling crude jokes with her friends, livetweeting bad movies, or riding her horse.
Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez is from Vilches, Chile. In 2010 she was one of 12 lucky Junies attending the Bucknell Writing Seminar for Younger Poets. Her current projects include a novel in Spanish and a novel-in-verse that interweaves two points of views: Adesa, an intersex character, and Aditi, a hijra in India. She is co-director of the not-for-profit Palampore Writers, which promotes positive social change by teaching creative writing in communities which have been oppressed, marginalized, and/or struck by natural disaster. She is a recent graduate of Cornell University’s Poetry MFA program.
