Mary Burns’ creative fiction writing began with a short story that won a prize at the 2000 Mendocino Coast Writers Conference.  In 2004, she was an invited participant at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers conference in Lake Tahoe, California.  In July 2005, her short story "The Sound of Dreaming" won the Ninth JerryJazzMusician Short Fiction contest, and is featured on their website (www.jerryjazzmusician.com).

Ms. Burns' varied writing experience includes more than twenty years in corporate and agency public relations and communications, including video scripts, radio commercials, annual reports, newsletters and executive speeches.  She managed the media coverage of the 1987 visit of Pope John Paul II to San Francisco, and was the producer of a local television morning talk show, Body and Soul.  She has a B.A. and M.A. in English from Northern Illinois University and a J.D. from Golden Gate University School of Law.

She is currently working as a consultant while pursuing her writing projects which include two literary novels, a mystery series, and a collection of interconnected short stories titled “Talking Under the Influence.”  Ms. Burns was born in Chicago and now lives with her husband Stuart in San Francisco.  Her website is at http://home.mindspring.com/~maryburns.

Alexandra Fox is a mother and grandmother who lives in a small village in the middle of England. She unexpectedly started writing short stories at the beginning of 2004, and now wants to do nothing else. She has won first prize in more than a dozen literary competitions, as well as other prizes and publications, print and web. These include a Supplementary Prize at Bridport, a runner-up story in the 2006 Asham anthology, and a StorySouth Notable Story of 2005.

She writes with Alex Keegan’s online Boot Camp, and finds (as do her family) that writing has changed her life.

Marge Petesch was born and raised in Iowa but has called the Piedmont region of North Carolina home for many years.  She is hard at work on her first novel, already has the second novel researched, and has written several pieces of short fiction.  She belongs to a very supportive women’s writing group, and when not writing, enjoys reading and gardening.  She also works full time.  She and her husband are diligently working on Life – Phase II, which will involve moving to the country and raising meat goats.

Cheryl Pace resides with her energetic sons, two phlegmatic cats, and one attention deficit dog in northwest Austin.  She currently works for a very fine Austin structural engineering firm which designs bridges and buildings for the state of Texas.  Cheryl has published magazine articles in the Plano Star Courier, Today’s Dallas Woman, and Dallas Family, fiction in “Short Stories from La Madeleine” and received a poetry award from the Mockingbird Chapter Poetry Society of Texas.  Cheryl holds an MFA in Writing from the University of Norwich in Montpelier, Vermont.