Caroline Allen (nonfiction)
Caroline Allen lives in Oak View, California, with her husband Bob DeBris. She has been teaching writing and literature courses at UCSB's College of Creative Studies for 17 years. This past year she has been teaching art in CCS' Pre-College Arts Institute, an outreach program for local junior high and high school students. Her publications include film and art reviews for the Santa Barbara Independent, numerous short stories in Spectrum magazine, and an essay in the Contemporary Art Forum's catalogue Bob DeBris: A Wrecktrospective. She is currently working on a collection of stories about boarding school.

William Auten (visual art)
Several of William Auten's paintings reside in private collections and have been printed in cultural journals. For more information, visit his Web site: http://www.mygoodeyeclosed.com.

B.A. Bosaiya (visual art)
Statement by the artist: We have come to see the world as devoid of mystery, and with these images I hope to restore some sense of wonder about the world around us. There was once a greater sense of mystery in the world sailors of long ago would tell tales of mysterious beasts in uncharted areas of the flat Earth. Hand-drawn maps had vast areas marked as "Unknown" and the darkest corners were marked with the wondrous phrase, "Here there be Dragons." Those days are gone now and the deep, dark secret places exist for us only inside our minds and in our imaginations. These photographs ask viewers to examine their interior lives, the secrets within themselves. My photos can act as a mirror into the viewer's unconscious mind. One thing that can be said for certain is that my photographs provide an instantaneous visceral reaction in almost every viewer. I want the images to do this, to encourage people to look into their interior lives, and to become aware of the mystery and beauty of the world around them. Web site: http://www.angelsandinsects.com.

Brian Glaser (poetry)
Brian Glaser's work has appeared in Berkeley Poetry Review, Five Fingers Review, Literary Imagination, North American Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily and Rapidfeed. He teaches English at Chapman University and lives with his wife and daughter in Orange, California.

Maria Hummel (nonfiction)
Maria Hummel is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Her publications include the novel Wilderness Run, winner of a Bread Loaf Fellowship and a selection of the Doubleday Literary Guild, and the poetry chapbook City of the Moon. She is a native of Vermont and lives in San Francisco.

Kitty Li (visual art)
Kitty Li was born in Hong Kong and raised east of east LA in Baldwin Park, California. After graduating from UC Santa Cruz, Kitty returned to China to study her native tongue. She currently lives in Xi'an, China and works as an English teacher at a local university. On her photography: "I'd have to say most of my photographs are accidental, a mere by-product of some obsessive compulsion to record a certain image before it is forgotten. Whether it's the erecting of a new apartment or the place our shoes occupy, space is constantly being rearranged in various ways so that the images stored in our memories are never exact and usually take form as an amalgamation of prominent features and nostalgia. It plays a central role in many of my photos mainly due to its transient nature and my inability to retain what I most want to remember. But for the most part, my photos are just the aesthetics of what I think looks cool."

Cheri Lucas (visual art)
Cheri Lucas is an award-winning Bay Area print journalist and contributes to various publications such as the San Mateo Daily Journal and Edutopia magazine. She studied screenwriting and art history at Loyola Marymount University and is currently an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at Goucher College.

Michael Lukas (fiction)
Born at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley, California, Michael Lukas has attended Step One Nursery School, Sierra School of the East Bay, Martin Luther King Junior High School, Berkeley High School, Brown University, and the University of Maryland, as well as short stints at the American University of Cairo and L'Institut Bourguiba des Langues Vivantes in Tunis. Now, for the first time in 25 years, he is not in school. His writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The New York Sun, The Washington City Paper, Warrior Magazine, and ReadyMade. The prequel to "The Story of George Taylor and Herbert Roe" appeared in In Posse Review. His Web site is: http://www.michaeldavidlukas.com.

Twila Nesky (nonfiction)
Twila Nesky is a graduate student in the nonfiction writing program at Portland State University, in Portland, Oregon. She won the 2001 Burnham Undergraduate Fiction award and was co-winner of the 2004 Tom Bates Graduate Nonfiction award. Her work has appeared in the Clackamas Literary Review, Sofa Ink, Irreverant Fish, Ooligan Press' "Best of 2005" and "Best of 2006" anthologies, and Street Roots newspaper. Twila finds most of her material by focusing on Portland's wealth of homeless writers, artists, and activists, and on her own need to discover the meaning of home. Investigating homelessness also, serendipitously, led her to meet and marry a fellow writer and homeless advocate last November.

Dee Rimbaud (visual art)
Dee Rimbaud is an artist, poet, novelist, editor and itinerant. He is author of two poetry collections, The Bad Seed and Dropping Ecstasy With The Angels; and one novel, Stealing Heaven From The Lips Of God. He edited Dada Dance, Acid Angel and The AA Independent Press Guide; and is currently working on The Book Of Hopes And Dreams. By the time you read this bio Dee will be on the road somewhere in Europe (possibly even Asia) with his partner, Su and daughter, Rosie Sunshine. His adventures will be recorded in his travel-blog: http://aaron-aardvark.blogspot.com. Dee's art is available on posters, t-shirts, etc. at: http://rimbaud-products.blogspot.com. His main Web site is at: http://www.thunderburst.co.uk.

PB Rippey (fiction)
PB Rippey's work has appeared in Zyzzyva, Pool, Runes, Solo 7, California Quarterly, Phoebe, The Chattahoochee Review, Slope and other journals. Her fiction placed third in the first Westsidestorycontest.com contest. Currently completing a collection of poetry and two novels, she lives and writes in North Hollywood, CA and attends workshops and readings conducted by the Hoir Poets of Venice. This is her second appearance in MARY.

Melissa Seley (nonfiction)
Melissa Seley attended the CCS Literature Program. She spent her fourth year as an undergraduate studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. Shortly thereafter she moved to an industrial village in southwest China to teach English to over 700 students for one year. Since then she has been living in Santa Barbara where she manages a chamber music ensemble, Camerata Pacifica. She keeps a journal about working in the world of classical music, and writes short stories and longer stories, as well as nonfiction profiles.

Jackie Shannon-Hollis (nonfiction)
Jackie Shannon-Hollis is a native Oregonian, currently living in Portland. She studies with the Dangerous Writers and is working on a short story collection set in and around a fictional farming community. Subtitles is her first publication and though she loves writing, getting to share it is something wonderful too.

Peter Jay Shippy (poetry)
Peter Jay Shippy was born in Niagara Falls, New York. He was raised on his family's apple farm, on the shore of Lake Ontario. Shippy's first book, Thieves' Latin (University of Iowa Press) won the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize. BlazeVOX Books has just published Alphaville, an abecedarian suite, as a free e-book. His work has been published in numerous journals, including The American Poetry Review, Fence and McSweeney's Internet Tendency. He teaches at Emerson College. His Web site is: http://www.peterjayshippy.com.

Caleb Slabbert (fiction)
Caleb Slabbert, 17, was born in Africa and lives in Falmouth, Maine, where he graduated from high school in 2005. His story in MARY, written when he was 16, is his first publication. Full-time college study still awaits him, but he doesn't yet know where. While in high school he completed a creative writing course and has since completed a psychology course, both at the University of Southern Maine. He is currently working on an independent film project and interning for an investment business. He enjoys cycling and running.

Feliz Hidalgo Smith (poetry)
Feliz Hidalgo Smith is a multimedia artist living and working in Brooklyn. These are her first poems in print.

Kimberly Thomas (fiction)
Kimberly Thomas works as an elementary school librarian in Louisville, KY. This is her second story appearing in MARY. Her stories have also appeared in the children's magazines Ladybug and Turtle.

Catherine Tyc (poetry)
Catherine Tyc lives in Portland, OR and has a B.A. in English Lit from Marymount Manhattan College. She has also studied writing at the St. Mark's Church in NYC and Naropa University in Boulder, CO. Her poetry has appeared on the Web sites, http://www.nthposition.com, Surgery of Modern Warfare.com and http://www.xcp.bfn.org. She has a short story that appears in the "Orpheus" edition of the Tiny Myth Series, a print/audio project that focuses on one Greek myth per issue (http://pocketmyths.blogspot.com) and a new one soon to be published in the NW Deviant anthology coming out this spring on Chiasmus Press.

Angela Voras (fiction)
Angela Voras is currently living in Madison, WI, where she is working on her BA in English and Creative Writing. This is her first published story.