Chris Vola
Chris Vola is the author of Monkeytown, E is for Ether, and the forthcoming Only the Dead Know Brooklyn. His work appears in The Rumpus, Monkeybicycle, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Collagist, and elsewhere. A former contributing books editor at The Brooklyn Rail, he lives in Manhattan and can be found at chrisvola.net.
Neil Tarpey
The North Coast Journal voted Neil Tarpey’s “Handgun Wedding” its best 99-word flash fiction story in 2009. A contest judge referred to Neil’s 2014 award-winning 99-word story “The Frog Clan” as “a gem.” Twelve of Neil’s flash fiction stories have been published. Neil quit booze and drugs at age 31, and subsequently earned two master’s degrees, in Teaching Writing and in Counseling Psychology, from Humboldt State University. Neil and his wife each grew up in New York City but met in Northern California’s coastal redwood country, where they live with their two dogs.
Mary Jo Melone
Mary Jo Melone is currently a writer-in-residence at Rivendell Writers Colony in Sewanee, TN. Her fiction has appeared in The Iron Horse Literary Review and 2 Bridges Review. She received her MFA in 2011 from the University of South Florida in Tampa, where she now studies linguistics and tutors international students. Formerly, she was a journalist.
Joel Best
Joel Best has published in venues such as Atticus, decomP, Carnival and Carcinogenic Poetry. He is the author of the collections “The Dogs Are Gone,” “Timeline” and “12 White Lies,” available at Smashwords. He lives in upstate New York with his wife and son.
Christopher Stolle
Christopher Stolle’s poetry has appeared in more than 100 magazines in several countries, including Labyrinth (Indiana University Honors Program), The Plaza (Japan), El-Shaddai (Singapore), Poetechniciens (England), Ultimate Ceasefire (Australia), and recently or forthcoming in the Tipton Poetry Journal, Flying Island, Writing Raw, Branches, and Snapdragon, and in three anthologies (In Our Own Words: A Generation Defining Itself [volumes 1 and 4; 1997 and 2002] and Reckless Writing [2012]). He has also published two nonfiction books with Coaches Choice: 101 Leadership Lessons From Baseball’s Greatest Managers (2013) and 101 Leadership Lessons From Basketball’s Greatest Coaches (2016). He works as a book editor and lives in Indianapolis.
BAM has a degree in English and graduated with honors. He’s been a columnist, a journalist, and ran a writer group to help aspiring authors. His stories have appeared, been awarded, and reprinted in Bartleby Snopes, Writer’s Ezine, and StoryShelter’s 2015 anthology, and his unpublished novel “Diaries of Karma” won the WILDsound contest. BAM currently teaches English to kids in Japan. For more info, check out: bamwrites.com