Mare Swallow is the Founder and Executive Director of the Chicago Writers Conference, as well as a professional public speaker and public speaking coach. She's the author of "25 Ways to Engage Your Audience," and is currently writing a book...  read

In 2001, Lawrence Santoro's novella "God Screamed and Screamed, Then I Ate Him" was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award by the Horror Writers Association. In 2002, his adaptation and audio production of Gene Wolfe's "The Tree Is My Hat,"...  read

Mary Beth Hoerner is a Chicago playwright and fiction writer. Her play Atomic Honeymoon was performed at the CORNservatory, she is a network playwright at Chicago Dramatists, and she was the recipient of a Ragdale residency in playwriting. Her short...  read

Originally a theater performer for 25 years, Dion Walton has been writing for the past ten. He's a published writer (Our Legacies: Writings from Chicago's Older Gay Men), a singer, and an artist who has presented work in galleries in...  read

Sara Ross Witt is the former co-producer and co-host of Tuesday Funk and a graduate of The New School MFA in Creative Writing program. She was raised in Ohio as a psychic by her biological mother, a detail she writes...  read

Robert McDonald's prose and poetry have appeared in a wide variety of print and online journals, including Sentence, The New York Quarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, and The Prose-Poem Project. He lives in Andersonville, works at in independent bookstore, and blogs...  read

Suzanne Clores is an author of narrative nonfiction, and is working on her second book, titled Invisible: How I Came to Accept the Extraordinary. She has written for The Huffington Post, Smith, The Nervous Breakdown, Next Avenue, Natural Health, Martha...  read

Jeremy Jasper obtained his bachelor's degree in Law Enforcement from Western Illinois in 2011 and is currently working towards his second bachelor's degree in Fiction Writing at Columbia College Chicago. His fiction has appeared in Joyland: A Hub for Short...  read

When not slowly going insane, Reinhardt Suarez writes, edits, and teaches video game writing at the Loft Literary Center in downtown Minneapolis. He is also a member of the Chicago-based band The Pork Chop Express—this he does simultaneously with going...  read

Wesley Chu was born in Taiwan and immigrated to Lincoln, Nebraska, where he grew up as one of approximately five Asian kids in the state. Eventually he ended up in Chicago, where he became a kung fu master and gymnast....  read