Catherine Kanjer Kapphahn (Cofounding Editor) teaches medical narrative workshops at Lehman College in the Bronx. Her essay “The Waiting Room” appeared in CURE, a magazine dedicated to supporting cancer patients and their caregivers. “Oriovac” an excerpt from her memoir The Stories You Never Told Me, about a daughter’s search for her Croatian mother’s elusive history, was published in Sunday Salon’s online magazine. Her essay “The Clinic” is forthcoming in Ars Medica: a journal of medicine, the arts, and humanities. Catherine received a B.A. from Hunter College and an MFA from Columbia University. She lives in Astoria, New York with her husband René and three-year-old son Radek.

René Georg Vasicek (Cofounding Editor) is a 2009 Artists’ Fellowship recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Camera Obscura, The Delinquent, Mid-American Review, Post Road, The Prague Revue, and elsewhere. His essay “Confessions of a Pilsner Drinker” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He teaches at Hofstra University and Lehman College of the City University of New York.

Nancy Agabian (Woodside Editor) Nancy Agabian is the author of Princess Freak (2000), a collection of poems and performance art texts on growing up Armenian in America. Her memoir on her relationships with her feminist mother and genocide survivor grandmother, Me as her again, is forthcoming from Aunt Lute Books (October 2008). She received a Fulbright fellowship to Armenia in 2006-07, where she tri-wrote (An)daratsutian Mej or In the (Un)space, an experimental book in French, English and Armenian with two other Armenian women writers. She is also the editor of Matnashoonch, an anthology of writing from the women’s creative nonfiction writing workshop in Yerevan, Armenia, which she led and was funded by CEC Artslink. Since 1994, she has been teaching writing workshops to diverse communities, from Los Angeles (Beyond Baroque) to New York (Queens College, City Tech, LaGuardia Community College) to Armenia (Yerevan State University, The Women’s Resource Center). She currently teaches and writes in Queens.

Cynthia Blake Thompson (Greenpoint Editor) began teaching writing in 1999 to inner city high school students with the Liberty Partnership Writing Program at Bank Street College. In 2006, she was a Faculty Writing Specialist in the Writing Across the Curriculum Program at Lehman College, CUNY where she taught writing and literature. Currently she teaches at New York University, Baruch College, CUNY, and Empire State, SUNY. Cynthia spent two years in Bolivia, first as a Fulbright Scholar and then as a David Boren Fellow, to research her book set in the northern Amazon region of Bolivia. She is presently revising this novel, The Rio Beni. Cynthia has published in The Bolivian Times, The Bradt Travel Guide to the Amazon, An Insider’s Guide to Bolivia, and in the Institute for Latin American Studies Newsletter, Columbia U. She and her partner Krzysztof Pytlak, a painter, run Java Studio in Greenpoint, which rents workspace to artists and offers artists the opportunity to exhibit their work in numerous shows held there throughout the year.