Mai Hoang was born in Vietnam and raised in northern California. After graduating from the University of California, Davis, she became a newspaper reporter. Since 2001, she has lived in New York City, working as an editor at magazines such as Ms. and World Press Review. She also edits the Asian-American online journal called TripmasterMonkey.com. She is working on a Vietnam War novel entitled The Testimony of Mr. Dao (its first chapter was a winning entry in this competition).

Marie Holmes was raised in a bunch of places, but mostly in Portland, Oregon. She has been living in New York for a while now, and earned an MFA at Sarah Lawrence College. Her stories have appeared in the Coe Review, Blithe House Quarterly and The Los Angeles Review (forthcoming.) She received the 2006 Gival Press Short Story Award. She currently lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her partner and pays her half of the rent by teaching Spanish to New York City high school students.

Darleen Lev spent three years teaching English in South Korea, an experience that helped her to develop an outsider’s view of American culture. Teaching writing to international students at Parsons the New School for Design has kept this perspective close, inspiring aspects of her novel-in-progress, The White Girl, the first chapter of which was selected for “Chapter One”. Bad Wind, Good Wind, a short story set in Korea and published in Chelsea was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has been awarded residencies at Yaddo and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. In addition to teaching and working to complete The White Girl, Lev works as an interior decorator.

Suzan Sherman's fiction has appeared in The Mississippi Review, American Short Fiction, BOMB, and the anthology Lost Tribe: Jewish Writers on the Edge (HarperCollins), among others. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Observer, BOOKFORUM, BOMB, and The Forward. She has been awarded grants for her fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Jerome Foundation, and fiction fellowships from the Ucross Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, and Ledig House, among others. She is completing her first novel, Pearl O'Shea.