Fiction

Allen Kopp is a technical writer and lives in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. His fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Foliate Oak Literary Journal, Temenos, The Legendary, Danse Macabre, Bartleby-Snopes, Skive, Hoi-Polloi, Conceit Magazine, Dark and Dreary Magazine, A Twist of Noir, Sunken Lines, The Storyteller, The Bracelet Charm, The Ranfurly Review, and Short-Story.Me.

Cary Holladay is the author of five volumes of fiction, most recently A Fight in the Doctor's Office, which won the Miami UP Novella Contest. Her work appears in recent issues of The Southern Review, Glimmer Train, The Georgia Review, and New Stories From the South: The Year's Best. Her awards include an NEA fellowship and an O. Henry Prize. A native of Virginia, Cary is married to the writer John Bensko. They teach in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Memphis.

Charlotte Holmes' stories and essays have appeared in many journals, including Epoch, New Letters, The Antioch Review, and The Sun. "After" is from the book-length group of related stories on which she's now working. Another story from this group was recently included in New Stories From the South: The Year's Best 2009, edited by Madison Smartt Bell. She teaches fiction writing at Penn State University.

Jen Knox writes and teaches fiction in San Antonio, Texas. Her writing appears in The Adirondack Review, Bound Off, Istanbul Review, Per Contra, and Room Magazine. Jen is currently writing a novel, and she recently released a chapbook of short stories, Don't Tease the Elephants, with Monkey Puzzle Press (2014).

Juli Henshaw's short stories have appeared in the South Dakota Review, Hawaii Review, and Beloit Fiction Journal. She is Professor of English and has taught Creative Writing/Fiction Workshops at both Phoenix and Mesa Community Colleges, Changing Hands Bookstore, and MADE in downtown Phoenix. She is currently on leave from Mesa Community College as she finishes her novel. She supplements her income by tutoring students of all ages in Writing, English Composition, and Critical Reading.

Karen Brown's first collection of short stories, Pins and Needles, was the recipient of AWP's Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction and published in 2007 by the University of Massachusetts Press. Her work has appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, and in journals that include The Georgia Review, Epoch, American Short Fiction, and Five Points. She studied creative writing at Cornell University, and the University of South Florida in Tampa, where she is currently a visiting instructor.

Kate Kostelnik is working on a PhD in English Literature at The University of Nebraska, Lincoln where she also teaches composition and creative writing. She did her undergraduate work at Colgate University and earned her MFA from the University of Montana in 2005. Her short stories, which earned her a 2007 New Jersey State Arts Council Fellowship, have appeared in 42 Opus, Invisible Insurrection, and, most recently, Hayden's Ferry Review. She has taught at the University of Montana and JP Stevens High School in New Jersey. She is currently working on a collection of short stories and a novel.

Leslie Epstein was born in Los Angeles to a family of film makers. His father and uncle together wrote dozens of films, including Casablanca. He has published ten works of fiction and his best known novel, King of the Jews, became a classic of Holocaust Fiction. His articles and stories have appeared in such places as Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's. He was a Rhodes Scholar and later won many additional awards and fellowships, including a Fulbright. He received his D.F.A. in Playwriting from the Yale Drama School. Epstein has been the director of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University for over thirty years.

Sherril Jaffe is the author of six books of fiction, including Scars Make Your Body More Interesting & Other Stories, The Unexamined Wife, and House Tours. A new novel, Expiration Date, is forthcoming in 2011. Her short stories have appeared in journals such is Epoch, Zyzzyva, and Alaska Quarterly Review. She has also published two memoirs Ground Rules and, in collaboration with her late husband, Alan Lew, One God Clapping, a San Francisco Chronicle best seller. A recipient of The Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence, a PEN Award, she is professor of creative writing at Sonoma State University.

Sudha Balagopal was born and raised in India and has lived in the United States for over two decades. She has a graduate degree in Journalism and Communications from the University of Florida. Recently her fiction has appeared in Blue Fog Journal, Literary Mama, Catamaran magazine, Muse India and Pax Americana among other literary journals. Her collection of short stories, There are Seven Notes, is forthcoming from Roman Books in 2010.

Vytatuas Malesh is a recent MFA graduate from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who now lives and works as a textbook editor and game designer in Detroit, Michigan. His short story "Hands" appeared in the November 2009 issue of Danse Macabre literary e-zine. He has won numerous academic awards, but is new to publication. He is currently polishing his first novel, entitled Dancing in the Ashes, while writing and maintaining Sardonic Shock Syndrome, a thrice-weekly blog of cynicism, criticism, humor, and scorn.