When not reading or writing poetry, Jes Gearing, a native of Atlanta, Georgia, can be found riding
around the dirty streets of Roanoke on her purple fixed gear bicycle or out scouting the local and
organic food scene in the surrounding counties. She chronicles the latter on her blog, Cupcake Punk,
and dreams of one day raising chickens and goats on a homestead in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Joseph Hasinger was born and raised in North Carolina. He currently lives in
Roanoke with his dog and writes fiction.
Brianna McPherson spent most of her life wishing she could get out of Ohio. Now that she's in
Virginia she spends most of her life wishing she could be in Vienna, Austria. She'll write anything
once but if you backed her into a corner she'd probably admit to liking nonfiction the best.
Meighan Sharp grew up in pre-Microsoft Redmond, Washington, and lived in Oregon, South Carolina, and Kentucky before moving to southwestern Virginia. She writes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and believes that a good piece of roadside trash is better than a fortune cookie.
Over in the Ohio Valley in western West Virginia, Lauren was born and raised. She finally left to
attend college in Vermont where she studied English and American lit., Religion, and fingerpainting.
After graduation, she worked as a coffee barista, hotel nightclerk and AmeriCorps volunteer. Now
she lives on a farm in Troutville with her cat, Doobie, and numerous roosters, chickens, and
peacocks, and attempts to write poems and short fiction and to paint watercolors and oils. The
Grateful Dead, yoga pants, chocolate cake, and California are a few of her favorite things.
Gretchen VanWormer grew up in Vermont, but now lives on the Roanoke frontier. She writes fiction.