Apricot Irving is a writer and radio producer whose most recent project, Boise Voices Neighborhood Oral History Project , brought together elders and youth in Northeast Portland. She is currently at work on “The Missionary’s Daughter,” about growing up on a missionary compound in Haiti.

Luca Dipierro is an illustrator, animator and writer born in Italy and living in the USA. He is the author of the book of fictions Biscotti Neri, published in Italy by Madcap, and of the art zine DAS DING. His stories and drawings have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The New York Tyrant, Gigantic, Locus, Everyday Genius, No Colony, PANK, Harp & Altar, The Sages of Baltimore. His art has been exhibited in Europe and the USA, and appears regularly on CD, LP, and book covers. Currently, Dipierro is working with writer Leni Zumas (who is also his partner in life) on a full-length animated film called Until I Find It. Dipierro’s work has been called “a perfect balance between creepy and charming” (The Huffington Post), “sad and beautiful” (L Magazine), and “innovative…striking…poignant …humorous” (Time Out New York).

Leni Zumas is the author of the story collection Farewell Navigator (Open City, 2008) and the novel The Listeners, forthcoming from Tin House in 2012. Her fiction has appeared in many journals, including Quarterly West, Open City, Salt Hill, New Orleans Review, Keyhole, New York Tyrant, and Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, Hedgebrook, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Santa Fe Art Institute, the MacDowell Colony, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Starting in Fall 2011, Zumas will be an assistant professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Portland State University.

Image credit Little Burn Films.

Ceiridwen Terrill is a writer and adventurer who loves to tell stories about humans and animals sharing home ground. She teaches environmental journalism and science writing at Concordia University in Portland.

Her memoir Part Wild will be released by Scribner in October 2011.

Julian Smith is an award-winning writer specializing in travel and science. His articles and photographs have appeared in Smithsonian, Wired, Outside, National Geographic Traveler, New Scientist, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and US News & World Report.

He is the author of travel guidebooks to El Salvador, Ecuador, Virginia and the Four Corners, and has won the country’s top travel writing award from the Society of American Travel Writers.

His memoir Crossing the Heart of Africa was released by Harper Perrenial in December 2010.

Ismet Prcic is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for fiction in 2010.  His work has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Bat City Review, Wazee Literary Journal, Prague Literary Review and IdentityTheory.com.

Ismet’s first novel entitled “Shards”, which will be published by Grove, Atlantic in October 2011.

Nancy Rommelman’s work has appeared in many publications offline and online, including the LA Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, Reason, Byliner and LA Observed.

She has published four books, most recently the novel, The Bad Mother (Dymaxicon 2011). She is currently working with Lili Ristagno on the re-release of her graphic novel Short Fuse, about the teenage lovers Charlie Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate and their 1958 killing spree in rural Nebraska. Forty Bucks and a Dream, a collection of Rommelman’s journalism and essays about Los Angeles, will be released in late 2011. To the Bridge, a work of nonfiction about Amanda Stott-Smith, who dropped her two young children off a Portland bridge in 2009, is in progress.

Rosanne E. Lortz is a medieval enthusiast, a history teacher, a book addict, a mom to two baby boys, and a native of Portland, Oregon. She graduated from New St. Andrews College. in 2005 with a B. A. in Liberal Arts and Culture and worked as a high school teacher for several years teaching classes in English, history, literature, and music. She married David Spears in December of 2009 and they were blessed with twin boys, Adam and Oliver, in November of 2010. When she’s not waking up with the twins at 3am, Rose is at work on her latest book, Road from the West, a novel set during the First Crusade and scheduled to be released on September 2, 2011.

Allison Cobb is the author of Born2 (Chax Press, 2004) about her hometown of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Green-Wood (Factory School, 2010) about a famous nineteenth-century cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. Her work combines history, personal narrative, and poetry to address issues of landscape, politics, and ecology. She was a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow and received a 2011 Individual Artist Fellowship award from the Oregon Arts Commission. She works for the Environmental Defense Fund, a national environmental nonprofit.

Image credit Allison Cobb.

Kevin Sampsell has been the publisher of Future Tense Books since 1990. His own books include the short story collections Beautiful Blemish and Creamy Bullets, and the memoir A Common Pornography. In 2009, he edited the anthology Portland Noir. He works for Powell’s Books and lives in Portland, Oregon.