A military brat, Cathie Sandstrom has lived in five countries and ten states. Twice a Pushcart nominee in 2017, her work is on the website of the Academy of American Poets at poets.org, and has appeared in The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Ekphrasis, and Lyric, among others. Anthologies include Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond. Her poem “You, Again” is in the artists’ book collection at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and she has a poem forthcoming in Poetry in Motion, sponsored by the Poetry Society of America. She serves on the Advisory Board of the National Veterans Foundation, for whom she blogged on veterans issues for Huffington Post; and on the editorial board of The Arbor, the magazine of the Knights of the Vine International Wine Brotherhood. Cathie lives in Sierra Madre, against the San Gabriels, where she still expects to hear from the Pentagon any day.

CB Lee is a Lambda Literary Award nominated writer of young adult science fiction and fantasy. Her works include the Sidekick Squad series (Duet Books), Ben 10 (Boom!) and All Out (Harper Teen). CB loves to write about queer teens, magic, superheroes, and the power of friendship. When not nationally touring as an educator, writer and activist, CB lives in Los Angeles, where she can neither confirm nor deny being a superhero. You can learn more about her and her adventures as a bisexual disaster at http://cb-lee.com.

Based in Boyle Heights, Cecilia Caballero is a creative nonfiction writer, poet, speaker, teaching artist, lecturer for the Department of Race and Resistance Studies at San Francisco State, and co-editor of the book The Chicana Motherwork Anthology. As a teaching artist, Cecilia facilitates poetry workshops to create more communal spaces for healing and social justice. Cecilia’s prose and poetry has been published in Dryland, Epiphany, Gathering: A Women Who Submit Anthology, Raising Mothers, The Acentos Review, and her work has recently been nominated for a Pushcart prize and a Rhysling award. Cecilia is currently working on her first book, a memoir titled Other Alive Creatures.

Chalat Rajaram, M.D., has practiced Internal Medicine in Orange County for the past 30 years. He  became  Medical Director of Vitas Healthcare in 2008. Until his retirement from VITAS in 2021, Dr. Rajaram was the External Faculty Director for the University of California, Irvine (UCI) palliative care fellowship program. He is certified by the Hospice Medical Directors Certification Board; is a Fellow of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine; is Board-Certified in Internal Medicine; and is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians.

Called “Southern California’s most inventive and accessible poet,” Charles Harper Webb is the nation’s foremost proponent of Stand Up Poetry. A former professional rock singer/guitarist and licensed psychotherapist, he is Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach. His latest of twelve collections of poetry is Sidebend World ( University of Pittsburgh, 2018). Webb has published a collection of essays, A Million MFAs Are Not Enough (Red Hen, 2016), and edited Stand Up Poetry: An Expanded Anthology (University of Iowa, 2002), used as a text in many universities. His awards include a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Tufts Discovery Award, and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. An avid fly-fisherman, Webb lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Chris Baron is the award winning author of Novels for Children including the novels in verse, All of Me, an NCTE Notable Book, and The Magical Imperfect, a Sydney Taylor Book Award Notable Book/ a SLJ Best Book of 2021. He’s a contributor to the Young Adult anthology Every Body Shines (2021) from Bloomsbury, and the author of Lantern Tree, winner of San Diego Book Award. Baron is a Professor of English at San Diego City College and director of the Writing Center. He grew up in New York City, but he completed his MFA in Poetry in 1998 at SDSU.

Award winning crime reporter Christine Pelisek has been covering crime for more than 20 years, most recently for PEOPLE Magazine. Pelisek’s previous positions include crime writer for the Daily Beast and the LA Weekly, where she broke the story about the return of a serial killer, who had been murdering women in South Los Angeles for decades but seemed to disappear. She dubbed the killer the “Grim Sleeper.” When Grim Sleeper serial killer Lonnie Franklin Jr. was arrested in July of 2010, Pelisek received commendations from the City of Los Angeles for her reporting, “which kept the public informed and resulted in further media attention.” Lifetime aired a movie about my role in the case and she wrote a critically acclaimed 2017 book, The Grim Sleeper: The Lost Women of South Central, that received national and international attention.

Claire Phillips is the author of the memoir A Room with a Darker View: Chronicles of My Mother & Schizophrenia. Director of the Los Angeles Writing Reading Series at Glendale College, she is a lecturer at CalArts, UC Irvine, and SCI-Arc. Her recent work can be found or is forthcoming at The Brooklyn Rail, Joyland, Large Heartedboy blog, and Vol.1 Brooklyn, among other places. She is at work on a novel entitled There Isn’t Any Driver.

Colleen Dunn Bates is the former publisher of Prospect Park Books, which she built to be one of L.A.’s leading trade publishers before selling it to Turner Publishing in 2021. Prospect Park’s books have won awards, been on bestseller lists, and won acclaim from national and international media. A sixth-generation Angeleno who earned a journalism degree from USC, Colleen was a writer and editor before becoming a publisher; her credits include everything from co-authoring the book Storybook Travels, to writing hundreds of articles for such magazines as Food & Wine, Westways, L.A. Style, Cooking Light, and Bon Appetit, to creating, co-authoring, and editing such books as Read Me, Los Angeles, Hometown Pasadena, and EAT: Los Angeles. She is currently figuring out her next stage of life from her home in Altadena.

Dana Claire has been writing since she was a little girl and has always dreamed of seeing her name on the spine of a book. In addition to being an author, she’s trained celebrities, professional athletes, and fitness enthusiasts for almost a decade in Barre, Yoga, and Sculpt. She lives bi-coastly with her husband, and has been an On-Air host on QVC weekend primetime and has been in countless fitness commercials and apps.

Dana Johnson is the author of the short story collection In the Not Quite Dark, forthcoming from Counterpoint in August 2016. She is also the author of Break Any Woman Down, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and the novel Elsewhere, California. Both books were nominees for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Callaloo, The Iowa Review and Huizache, among others, and anthologized in Watchlist: 32 Stories by Persons of Interest, Shaking the Tree: A Collection of New Fiction and Memoir by Black Women, and California Uncovered: Stories for the 21st Century. Born and raised in and around Los Angeles, she is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Dana Middleton is an author of contemporary novels for young readers. Her latest book, Not a Unicorn, is from Chronicle Books. She is also the author of The Infinity Year of Avalon James (a Young Hoosier Book Award nominee and Oregon Battle of the Books selection) and Open If You Dare, as well as the non-fiction reference book, The Young American’s Unofficial Guide to the Very British World of Harry Potter. Dana grew up in Georgia, but lives in Los Angeles with her British husband. She has been a member of the Litfest Pasadena steering committee for the past five years.

Daniel A. Olivas is playwright, attorney, and the author of ten books including How to Date a Flying Mexican: New and Collected Stories (University of Nevada Press), and Crossing the Border: Collected Poems (Pact Press). He is also the editor of Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature (Bilingual Press). Olivas has written for many publications including the New York Times, Alta Journal, The Guardian, La Bloga, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Follow him on Twitter: @olivasdan.

Deborah A. Lott’s memoirs, essays, and reportage have been published in the Rumpus, Salon, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Bellingham Review, Black Warrior Review, Cimarron Review, the Los Angeles Times, StoryQuarterly, the Good Men Project, the nervous breakdown, and many other places. Her family’s legacy of hypochondria was featured on NPR’s “This American Life.” Her first book, In Session: the Bond between Women and Their Therapists, offered an unprecedented look at psychotherapy from the perspective of clients interviewed by the author. Her essays have been thrice named as “notables of the year” by Best American Essays. She teaches creative writing and literature at Antioch University, Los Angeles, where she serves as faculty advisor to Two Hawks Quarterly.com. She lives with her husband, Gary Edelstone, in Los Angeles.

Don Kingfisher Campbell, MFA @ Antioch University Los Angeles, taught at Occidental College Upward Bound for 35 years. He has been a coach and judge for Poetry Out Loud, a performing poet/teacher for Red Hen Press Youth Writing Workshops, LA Coordinator and Board Member of California Poets in the Schools, poetry editor of the Angel City Review, publisher of Spectrum literary magazine, organizer of the San Gabriel Valley Poetry Festival, and host of the Saturday Afternoon Poetry reading series in Pasadena, CA.

Dr. Jalondra A. Davis is a Black feminist artist-intellectual, merwomanist Melusine, and fierce warrior mama living near the beaches of Southern California. She holds a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from UC Riverside with a designated emphasis in Science Fiction and Technocultures and a Master of Professional Writing from USC. Her scholarly book project in progress, Merfolk and the Black Aquatic focuses on mermaids, water spirits, and other aquatic-themed figures in African diasporic literature, art, and performance. She is author of the coming-of-age novel Butterfly Jar and she is at work on a mermaid novella. She blogs about special needs parenting on www.jalondradavis.com and posts about mermaids and self-care on Instagram as @mami_melusine. Jalondra currently works as a University of California Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the UCSD.

Dr. Kate Gale is co-founder and Managing Editor of Red Hen Press, Editor of the Los Angeles Review, and she teaches in the Low Residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska in Poetry, Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction and in the Ashland, Ohio MFA Program. She is author of seven books of poetry including The Goldilocks Zone from the University of New Mexico Press, Echo Light from Red Mountain, and six librettos including Rio de Sangre, a libretto for an opera with composer Don Davis, which had its world premiere October 2010 at the Florentine Opera in Milwaukee.

Dustin Davis is an American cowboy, instructor, clinician, and co-author of his debut book Cowboys & Conductors: Conversations in Horsemanship-Humanship. Dustin was born and raised in Colorado and now calls Southern California home with his wife, daughter, and a hundred plus horses, cattle, and dogs. Dustin currently operates a horsemanship barn and also travels the country offering horsemanship clinics helping horses and their humans. Dustin’s training methods, coined Grey Leadership in this book, exemplify a servant-leadership style versus a traditional leadership style in that the power is shared with the horse and that the needs of the horse come first which helps them develop and perform as highly as possible. In the words of Ray Hunt “I haven’t found a horse these methods don’t work for” and Dustin agrees with this philosophy and is carrying on the legacy of these great horsemen. There is a very logical and fundamental connection between these methods and “humanship” as discussed in the book and how the methods Dustin uses for horses can be used for humans and business relationships alike.

Elan Barnehama’s new novel, Escape Route (May 2022, Running Wild Press), is set in NYC during the late 1960s. His words have appeared in Drunk Monkeys, Entropy, Rough Cut Press, Boston Accent, Jewish Fiction, HuffPost, the New York Journal of Books, Public Radio, and elsewhere. He was a presenter at the 2019 Boston Book Festival, a Writer-In-Residence at Wildacres, NC, and Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts, Fairhope, AL, and the fiction editor at Forth Magazine LA. He earned an MFA from UMass, Amherst where he worked with George Cuomo and John Edgar Wideman. Elan has taught college writing, has worked with at-risk youth, had a gig as a radio news guy, and did a mediocre job as a short-order cook. He’s a New Yorker by geography. A Mets fan by default.

Elise was born and raised in Pasadena California and attends Pasadena City College. She is currently a Communications major. She loves writing poetry, reading, doing anything nature-related, and dancing by herself till odd hours in the night.