Carol Potter's third book of poems, A Short History of Pets, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Award (1999), and the Balcones Award. Her other awards include a Pushcart Prize, The New Letters Award for Poetry, and the Tom McAfee Discovery Award from the Missouri Review. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Field, The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry Miscellany, The Journal, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Pushcart Prize xxvi, Best of the Small Presses, and many others. Her most recent book, Otherwise Obedient was published by Red Hen Press and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in GLBT poetry.

Author and performer Jillian Lauren grew up in suburban New Jersey and fled across the water to New York City. She attended New York University for three minutes but promptly dropped out to work with Richard Foreman's Ontological Hysteric Theater and with The Wooster Group, among others. Her memoir, SOME GIRLS, will be published by Plume/Penguin on April 27, 2010.

Jillian has an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. Her writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, Flaunt Magazine, Pindeldyboz Magazine, Opium Magazine, The Chiron Review, Society, Pale House: A Collective and in the anthology My First Time: A Collection of First Punk Show Stories.

She has read at spoken word events in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, including Tongue and Groove, Talk, Talk, Talk and Words like Sugar. She has recently worked with directors as diverse as Steve Balderson, Lynne Breedlove and Margaret Cho.

She is married to musician Scott Shriner. They live in Los Angeles with their son.