Atossa Shafaie was born in Tehran, Iran. The revolution caused her family to move to London, England and then to the United States. She has a B.A in English Literature from George Washington University. Her short story Mind the Gap was published in the Scribes Valley anthology Destination Elsewhere as well as winning the Dreamquest short fiction competition. She is currently working on her first manuscript entitled Blood of Persia, a historical fiction about Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian Empire.

Alexander Maggio spent a formative period living in Beirut, Lebanon and worked for both the State Department and the Department of Defense before electing to pursue a career as a writer. This choice, predictably, came after he eschewed all writing classes as an undergraduate because they were “impractical.” He will begin the graduate MFA program in playwriting at UCLA in the fall of 2008.

Current projects include Ice Core, a two-act play about love, abandonment, and climate change in life of an ornery archaeologist and White Kisses, a one-act exploration of hedonism and loneliness during the July War between Israel and the Hizbullah.

Alex is a graduate of Yale University and currently serves as a Teaching Fellow in History at Andover Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.

Pablo Stewart , born Buenos Aires, was thrown out of Argentina, aged four, by the much-sung Eva Peron. Disorientated, Pablo’s parents fought back, produced seven children and moved to England. Pablo grew up in London, moved to Oxford and took time out to marry Simone, to produce three children of their own and to travel. In 2001, he returned to his early love of writing and produced two unpublished and, in his own words, unspeakable novels. On Oxford University’s Creative Writing programme, under Dr Clare Morgan, he studied his art and learned the most important lesson of all, that learning is never done. He has won two short story awards, Chapter One and London Writers. Pablo is a lover of the short story form and believes it is due a big revival. He is influenced by the Bible, Raymond Carver and Hans Christian Andersen.

Julie Curwin thought about writing for several decades until a mid-life crisis and a rural writer’s workshop prompted her to actually start doing it in 2007. In the fall of that year, she was selected as one of 12 finalists in the Writer’s Union of Canada’s Short Prose Competition for Developing Writers. The Other Side of the Window is her first attempt at short fiction but her creative non-fiction work has appeared in The Medical Post and the Canadian Medical Association Journal. In her spare time, she works as a psychiatrist, grows vegetables, and trains for Ironman triathlons. She lives with her husband and a variety of furry critters on beautiful Cape Breton Island, on the east coast of Canada.