Jessica Broaddus

Jessica Broaddus grew up along the Rapidan River in central Virginia and received her B.A. in English from Davidson College in North Carolina. Jessica has taught fiction and creative nonfiction for four summers at the University of Virginia Young Writers’ Workshop. After living in the crowded suburbs of D.C. for two years, she has returned to the Blue Ridge to write about space and finding it and having it (among other things). Jessica focuses primarily on fiction, though she has experience in poetry, creative nonfiction, and science writing.

Ashley Nicole Montjoy, originally from Tallahassee, Florida, earned her BA and MA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from Florida State University. She has taught composition at Florida State University and at Tallahassee Community College. She also lived in South Korea for eighteen months where she was an English Instructor at Chosun University in Gwangju. She has received the Patterson Fund from the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, an artist grant from the Vermont Studio Center, and a fellowship from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Passages North, So to Speak, Slipstream, Diner, Rainbow Curve and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing her MFA at Virginia Tech and lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Megan Moriarty grew up in Staten Island, New York and received her BA in English from The City University of New York, College of Staten Island. While an undergraduate there, she was awarded The Rehberg Memorial Poetry Prize and The Keyla Salgado Prize for Best Love Poem. In 2007, she attended the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets. She currently lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.

After growing up wandering the hills, marshes, and forests of Truro, Cape Cod, Katherine earned a B.A. in philosophy from Trinity College and a M.A. in the same from Boston College. Her essays and articles have been published in a variety of magazines including Adoption Today, Fostering Families Today and And Baby. She was a finalist for the Goldfarb Family Fellowship for Nonfiction Writers and was recently awarded a two-week residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Byline Magazine, Breadcrumb Scabs: A Poetry Magazine, PANK, Controlled Burn, and Gertrude. Katherine was honored to receive Virginia Tech’s 2009 Emily Morrison Prize for Poetry. She currently lives in Blacksburg with her husband, Dan, and four of their five children.

Rob Talbert

It’s easy to overlook the fact that behind almost every great piece of writing is hard work. For most of us, myself included, trying to say what you want to say and in the right way is the most difficult and unforgiving task to undertake. I find that other writers say so clearly what I’m only scraping on the page, and if that means I’m speaking clearly for someone else then there’s a lot more responsibility in this process than I thought. Either way, it keeps me moving through to the end because what’s locked up inside is just as important as what’s on the page, for myself or anyone, and that’s why the hard work is worth it.

Julia Tillinghast-Akalin

Julia Clare Tillinghast-Akalin grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan and studied poetry as an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College. She lived in Istanbul, Turkey, for four years before coming to Blacksburg to study poetry at Virginia Tech. In addition to her own poetry, she has been collaborating with Richard Tillinghast on Dirty August, a book of translations of the experimental Turkish poet Edip Cansever, due to be published by Talisman Press toward the end of 2008. She lives in Blacksburg with her husband Sehmuz and their son, Hamza.