Jerry James has won prizes for his short stories in Chicago, San Diego, Portland and Bantry, Ireland. Another story appears at Clean Sheets under a pseudonym.

He is also a playwright whose works have been variously produced in New York, Toronto, Munich, Denver, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Boca Raton, Washington and on tour in Great Britain. His most recent play, Changing the Face of Medicine, was commissioned by the National Library of Medicine in 2004.

For eight years Jerry wrote a monthly column, The Life, for the alternative monthly, Voices, in which he chronicled the lives of characters on the fringe of the contemporary theatre scene.

Education: West Virginia (BFA), the US Army (SP4, Vietnam era) and Penn State (MFA). In 1975-76 he spent fourteen months with a wagon train.

A member of Actors Equity, the Dramatists Guild and the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop, Jerry lives in New York City with his wife, Kathleen McGrath.

Mark Farrington is fiction advisor in the Johns Hopkins M.A. in Writing Program. He also works in an administrative capacity for the Northern Virginia Writing Project, where he is a Teacher Consultant and a member of the board. He has a B.A. from Colby College and an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from George Mason University. He has published short fiction in The Louisville Review, The New Virginia Review, and other journals, and his fiction has won the Dan Rudy Fiction Prize and a Virginia Commission on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship Award. He has also published articles about writing and the teaching of writing. In 2003 he was a recipient of the Johns Hopkins M.A. in Writing Program's Outstanding Teaching Award, and in 2004 he received the Outstanding Faculty Award from the Advanced Academic Programs at JHU. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia, with his wife Christina and springer spaniel Sophie.

Prodigality is Chris Bailey’s first published work of fiction, and is part of a novel in progress. Her non-fiction work has appeared in The Upper Room, in numerous U.S. newspapers and in mailboxes across the country. She divides her time between fiction writing practice and a part-time job as a communications coordinator, with responsibility for producing print and electronic materials. She studied journalism and poetry writing at The University of Alabama, and lives with her husband in Columbia, SC.

Gabriela Blandy currently lives in Mexico where she finds time to write in between the beautiful Pacific sunsets and her other more respectable job – selling chocolate brownies on the beach. She graduated with a first class degree in History, went on to study at the London School of Journalism and has been inseparable from her keyboard since. She has been awarded an Honorary Mention from Writers’ Digest, was longlisted for the Fish Short Story Award and has had several publications. At present, she is working on an application for a Creative Writing MA, which she has longed to do and only recently found the courage. She dreams of living in a castle and writing fairy tales.