Melissa Wyse is a fiction writer and essayist. She has held residencies at MacDowell, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Ragdale. Her work appears in publications including Shenandoah, the Rumpus, Momus, and Urbanite, and her first book is forthcoming from Chronicle. She founded and directs the Idlewild Writers Retreat.

Kate Moses is the author of Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath and Cakewalk, A Memoir; coeditor of two anthologies on motherhood: Mothers Who Think and Because I Said So; and a founding editor of Salon. She teaches and mentors writers at Birds & Muses Literary Services: www.birdsandmuses.com.

Emily Cook was named one of Publishers Weekly's “Top 40 Under 40.” Former Marketing & Publicity Director at Milkweed Editions and Program Director at the Chicago Tribune Lit Fest Fest, she also worked for Granta and helped launch Figment, a social networking site. She just completed her first book.

Maggie Marshall is a novelist and award-winning screenwriter, and is the co-founder of the Flatiron Writers Room in Asheville, NC. She has written for numerous 1-hour TV dramas, and has had fiction and nonfiction pieces published in The Great Smokies Review.

Carla Du Pree's fiction appears in several literary journals. She's executive director of CityLit Project, a councilor with the Maryland State Arts Council, a VCCA, Rhode Island Writers Colony and Poetry Foundation fellow, a recipient of a Rubys Grant and MSAC Individual Artist award for her novel.