Hannah Baker-Siroty has studied writing at The University of Wisconsin, Madison (B.A.) and Sarah Lawrence College (M.F.A.). She has worked for DoubleTake Magazine and is a former editor of The Madison Review. A former emerging writer fellow at The Writers' Room her poetry has appeared in Lumina and the anthology Earshot: the First Offenders and online at RantArt.com and stopbuyingstuffmagazine.com. She is currently working on her first collection of poems and teaches writing at Pine Manor College.

Jennifer Barber's book Rigging the Wind won the Kore First Book prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Marlboro Review, Four Way Reader #2, the Massachusetts Review, Agni, Partisan Review, 96 Inc., Poetry, and Orion. She received a Bruce Rossley New Voices award in 1998, and a selection of her poetry appeared in Take Three: 3, published by Graywolf Press. She is founding and current editor of Salamander, a magazine for poetry, fiction, and memoirs.

Mary Bonina has had poems in English Journal, Hanging Loose and many other journals and magazines, as well as in three anthologies, including Vacations: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (Tall Grass Literary Guild and Outrider Press, 2006) and Voices in the City, a project of the Rutgers University Institute on Ethncity, Culture, and Modern Experience (Hanging Loose Press, 2004).   She was winner of Boston Contemporary Authors, a public art project, and her poem "Drift" was set in a granite monolith permanently installed outside Green St. MBTA Station on the Orange Line.   She holds her MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.   About her chapbook Living Proof published in November 2007 by Cervena Barva Press, poet Mary Bane Campbell (author of Trouble, Carnegie Mellon Press, 2003) has said, "the voice of these poems knows death, luck, the mall, the hard edges of place, New England places, the violence of the world.   It runs, very concretely and in many poems, past what its bearer sees as if standing still in deep attention.   It is written so that he who runs may read, but it turns entirely inside out the terms and assumptions of that old insult.   What a place this human world would be if we all ran at Mary Bonina's speed, what Flannery O'Connor once called 'the terrible speed of mercy.'"

CD Collins is a Kentucky native who follows the storytelling traditions of the South, both as a solo artist and when accompanied by musicians. As one of originators of the early ‘90s resurgence of spoken-word with live music, her work has been archived in two award-winning compact discs: Kentucky Stories and Subtracting Down. She has produced a video based on a track from her new disc The Carousel Lounge. This short documentary, entitled Clean Coal Big Lie chronicles the catastrophic steps of mountaintop removal to retrieve Appalachian coal. Collins’ fiction has appeared in numerous literary magazines including StoryQuarterly, Salamander, Phoebe and The Pennsylvania Review. Her poetry collection Self Portrait with Severed Head was released in March 2009. And her collection of short stories Blue Land was released in June 2009 Press. One of the stories in the collection was nominated for a 2009 Pushcart prize. For more information please visit her website at www.cdcollins.com and check out a new video.

Gail Fenske is the author of the recent book, The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York (University of Chicago Press, 2008), the first history of the noted New York landmark, and she is currently preparing a co-edited book, Aalto and America for publication. She has also published several essays as chapters in books, recently among them The American Skyscraper: Cultural Histories (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Inventing the Skyline (Columbia University Press, 2000). The Skyscraper and the City received the New York City Book Award, Book of the Year, and a PROSE Award, Honorable Mention, Excellence in Scholarly Publishing, from the Association of American Publishers. She holds a Ph.D. in the History, Theory & Criticism of Architecture from MIT, is a registered architect, and teaches in the School of Architecture, Art & Historic Preservation at Roger Williams University.

Pamela Greenberg has an M.F.A. from Syracuse University and a Masters in Jewish Studies from Hebrew College. She has received several writing awards, including a University Fellows award at Syracuse, a residency at the Millay Colony for the Arts, and a residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her work has been published in a number of journals, including The Green Mountains Review, The Missouri Review, and Shankpainter.She also received an award in Hebrew Literature at Hebrew College, and spent a year in rabbinical school before deciding to dedicate herself more fully to writing. As part of her rabbinical school training, she spent a year working as a hospital chaplain with people who were sick, dying, and mourning. Her translations from the Spanish have appeared in the magazine Circumference, and an excerpt from her psalm translation appeared in the Book World section of the Washington Post. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and young son. More information on her new book, The Complete Psalms: The Book of Prayer Songs in a New Translation can be found at www.thecompletepsalms.com.

Eric Grunwald is a writer, reviewer, translator, and occasional actor in Boston. He was managing editor of Agni from 2000 to 2004, and his work has appeared in Partisan Review, The MacGuffin, The Boston Sunday Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, Spoiled Ink, and other magazines and newspapers. He has received grants from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation (2003) and the St. Botolph’s Club Foundation (2001) and fellowships from the Writers’ Room of Boston, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. He is chair of PEN New England’s Freedom to Write Committee, which defends writers worldwide, ran its prison writing workshops in Massachusetts for three years. In addition to still teaching in the prison, Grunwald now teaches writing (including the occasional fiction workshop) and literature at Suffolk University and ESL at Roxbury Community College and does manuscript consulting for Grub Street Writers.

Courtney Humphries is a freelance journalist and author specializing in science, health, and nature. Her work has appeared in publications such as Seed Magazine, Body+Soul Magazine, Conservation Magazine, and online at Gourmet.com, and TechnologyReview.com. She is also a contributing editor for Harvard Magazine. Humphries is author of Superdove: How the Pigeon Took Manhattan....And the World, a natural history of pigeons published in August 2008 by Smithsonian Books. Superdove was acclaimed in the New York Times Book Review, New Scientist, and Audubon, among others, and Humphries was featured in USA Today and NPR's On Point. She is also a co-author with Dr. W. Allan Walker of two guides to nutrition from Harvard Health Publications, Eat, Play, and Be Healthy, and The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating During Pregnancy. Humphries is a graduate of MIT's Graduate Program in Science Writing and previously worked as a staff writer at Harvard Medical School's publication Focus and a writer and editor for Harvard Medical International. She lives in Boston.

Amy Marcott's fiction has appeared in Memorious and Juked, was nominated for a 2009 Pushcart Prize, won third place in Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Contest, was a finalist in Glimmer Train's Fiction Open Contest, and has been nominated for Scribner's Best New American Voices anthology and the Associated Writing Programs' Intro Awards. She was awarded a Somerville Arts Council fellowship and received an MFA in fiction writing from Penn State and a bachelor's degree from Wesleyan University. She has been a professional writer and editor for many years and currently plies her trade at MIT and teaches at Grub Street. Her first novel is currently under consideration.

Maria Eugenia Mayobre was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1976. In 1998 she obtained her BA in Visual Arts from the UCAB and in 1999 moved to Barcelona, Spain, where she obtained her Master's Degree in Communications and Education. Back in Venezuela, from 2001 to 2006, she worked as a copywriter, TV screenwriter and university teacher. She moved to Boston in January 2007 and obtained a Screenwriter Certificate from Emerson College in 2008. Her feature length screenplay, "Not Like Mom", won the 2009 Emerson Annual Screenwriting Prize. Her short film "Amber Alert"; won a www.filmaka.com short film competition. Her short film "Marry Me" was selected in 2008 as a finalist for the SAB Miller/Filmaka short film competition. Her commercials "First Word" and "First Step" were both nominated for New England Emmy Awards in 2009. She currently lives in Boston, working as a freelance bilingual copywriter, translator and screenwriter. Her website is: www.mariamayobre.com

Stephen McCauley is the author of four novels: True Enough, The Man of the House, The Easy Way Out, and The Object of My Affection. His stories, reviews, and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, the Boston Globe, Harpers, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Details, Travel and Leisure, (New York) Newsday, and many other publications. He has an MFA in writing from Columbia University and has taught writing and literature at Brandeis University, Harvard University, Wellesley College, and University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Maria Pinto is a recent graduate of the creative writing program at Brandeis University, where she won the Dafna Zamarripa-Gesundheit Prize for best senior thesis. She was the editor in chief of Seeds in the Black Earth, the international literary journal from A.W. Dreyfoos School of the Arts, which has published the poetry of Spencer Reece, Robert Lax, and Matthew Rohrer along with works by students. She has also been published in the journals Blind Man's Rainbow and Laurel Moon. She is currently working on a piece of long fiction at the Writer's Room, where she is the Ivan Gold fellow.

Sophie Powell grew up in London and a sheep farm in Wales. She graduated in Classics from Cambridge and has an MFA in Fiction from New York University. She is the author of the novel The Mushroom Man, which was translated into several languages, and lives in Boston with her husband Christian with whom she is co-writing a horror-thriller screenplay, Marston Moor. She teaches at Boston College and Grub Street and is currently researching wolf hybrids for her second novel. Her website is: www.meetsophiepowell.com.

Maureen Rogers, a native of Worcester, has spent more than twenty years in the field of high-technology product marketing. She left a full-time corporate position in 2002 to forge a new career as a marketing consultant, a move designed to enable her to devote more of her time and energy to writing fiction (and creative nonfiction that has absolutely nothing to do with technology). She is working on a collection of short stories at the Writers' Room. Her story, "At the Lake," appeared in the anthology Next Parish Over: A Collection of Irish American Writing. Her blog is: http://pinkslipblog.blogspot.com

Mark Schafer is a literary translator, visual artist, and co-coordinator of the Spanish-English Translation Certificate Program at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. Schafer's translation, Before Saying Any of the Great Words: Selected Poetry of David Huerta was published in January 2009 by Copper Canyon Press. For more information on this book and to hear Huerta reading his poetry in Spanish, go to www.beforesaying.com. Schafer has translated novels, short stories, essays, and poetry by many other Latin American authors including Virgilio Piñera, Gloria Gervitz, Alberto Ruy Sánchez, Jesús Gardea, Eduardo Galeano, and Antonio José Ponte. He has received numerous grants and awards for his translations, including the Robert Fitzgerald Prize and two Translation Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Schafer's translation of Belén Gopegui's novel La escala de los mapas (The Scale of Maps) will be published by City Lights in fall 2010. He is also a visual artist who makes provocative collages with maps that can be viewed at www.marksonpaper.us.

Katrin Schumann's writing can be found at katrinschumann.com

Heather Stephenson is an award-winning journalist with a deep commitment to improving the health of people and our planet. As the publisher at the Appalachian Mountain Club, a nonprofit based in Boston, she leads the creation of a magazine, books, blogs, and other media to encourage people to enjoy and protect the mountains, forests, waters, and hiking trails of the Northeast. Previously, she focused on helping women achieve better health for themselves and their communities in her role as editor of 2005 edition of the classic women’s health “bible,” Our Bodies, Ourselves, and two more recent books from the same group, Our Bodies, Ourselves: Menopause and Our Bodies, Ourselves: Pregnancy and Birth. Heather holds a bachelor's degree in English, summa cum laude, from Princeton University, and a master's degree in theological studies (world religions) from Harvard Divinity School. Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The New York Times Magazine, Amnesty Now, and Poets & Writers, among other publications, and in the books The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, A Vermont Century: Photographs and Essays from the Green Mountain State, and Eating Our Hearts Out: Personal Accounts of Women's Relationship to Food. She has won awards from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, the Vermont Press Association, the New England Associated Press News Executives Association, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Amy Sutherland’s most recent book is What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love and Marriage (Random House), which has been optioned for a film starring Naomi Watts. She is also the author of Kicked, Bitten and Scratched (Viking), which follows students through the top school for exotic animal trainers, and Cookoff (Viking), which chronicles a year on the competitive cooking circuit. She has written for a range of publications including The Boston Globe, Cooking Light, The Washington Post, Boston Magazine and The New York Times. Her Modern Love column for the Times, on which her most recent book is based, was the newspaper's most emailed story of 2006. She teaches part-time at Boston University's College of Communications.

Peter Thomson is a failed housepainter and waiter who is forever grateful and amazed that there is a field known as journalism through which he can channel his idle wandering, undisciplined curiosity and penchant for making glib observations into a more-or-less respectable living. His work over the last fifteen years or so has focused largely on the relationship between people and their natural and built environment, primarily through the vehicle of NPR's Living On Earth, at which he served in a variety of senior positions and won a sackful of minor awards after helping to launch the program as its founding editor and producer in 1991. Ten years later, he took advantage of a large hole being blown in his life by grabbing his younger brother and jumping a series of trains and boats for Alaska, Japan, Siberia, Lake Baikal and points ever farther west until they once again found themselves back in Boston, after which, not knowing what else to do, he blithely decided to try to write a book about the journey. The last couple of years have seen him holed up and mumbling to himself at such places as the Mesa Refuge in Pt. Reyes Station, California; the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire; the Rockefeller Foundation's Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy and this here Writers' Room of Boston. If he's lucky, Sacred Sea: A Journey to Lake Baikal, was published by Oxford University Press.

Ken Urban (Playwright): Ken’s plays have been produced and developed at SPF @ The Public, The Flea, Wlliamstown Theatre Festival, Playwrights Horizons, New York Theatre Workshop, The Huntington, Theatre of NOTE, Theatre @ Boston Court, Target Margin, and Soho Rep. He is the winner of the 2008 Weissberger Playwriting Award, the 2007 Huntington Playwriting Fellowship, the 2009 Writers’ Room of Boston Emerging Writers Fellowship and two summer MacDowell Colony Fellowships. His plays include The Private Lives of Eskimos (Stage Left, Chicago; Open Circle, Seattle; The Committee, NYC), I (HEART) KANT (Moving Arts, LA; George Street Playhouse Second Space, NJ; The Committee, NYC; Rude Guerrilla, LA; Union Garage, Seattle), The Happy Sad (SPF @ The Public, NYC; The Flea, NYC), and Nibbler (Theatre of NOTE, LA). He is currently working on a site-specific play for Rising Phoenix Rep to premiere in NYC in 2011, an adaptation of Aristophanes’ The Wasps, and a screenplay adaptation of his play The Happy Sad. His work is included in the anthologies Plays and Playwrights 2002 and New York Theatre Review as well as numerous monologue and ten-minute play collections. His short film Get The Balance Right was named one of the best of the 48 Hour Film Project in Boston. Ken currently divides his time between Cambridge, MA and New York City. Next spring, he will be the Briggs Copeland Lecturer in Playwriting at Harvard University. In addition to teaching at Harvard, Ken has taught playwriting and theatre at Tufts University, Rutgers University and Bucknell University. He makes electronic music as Occurrence, and the band released its first album Lonesome Animals this summer. www.kenurban.org