Until recently, FITO AVITIA was a teacher of English in Juárez, Mexico. In February 2012, he took over the directorship of a children’s orphanage in the city. Many of the children in the home are refugees of the city’s violence while others are from dysfunctional families or have parents who were involved in the cartel’s work. Due to the inherent danger in writing about the violence in Juárez, where drug cartels have notoriously gone after those who have spoken out about the situation, we are not including his picture.
ELISABETH HOFBOER BRESLAV is a columnist and feature writer for The Villager, a bi-monthly magazine in Stratford, Connecticut, where she lives. She was born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, but lived in the nearby town of Amstelveen during the Nazi occupation of Holland. She came to the U.S. in 1956. Her essay is taken from an unpublished memoir.
DAVID GRIFFITH is the author of A Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America (Soft Skull, 2006). His essays and reviews have appeared in the Utne Reader, IMAGE and The Normal School, and online at Killing the Buddha and Bookslut. He teaches creative writing at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. He blogs at davidgriffith.tumblr.com.
REBECCA HENDERSON is a Texas writer who moved to Washington State via China. Her writing draws on ten years of experiences living in Yunnan Province on the border of Burma and Laos where she worked as a teacher, amateur linguist, translator and at various other jobs in remote mountain villages. In Washington, she teaches a beginning English class for pre-literate learners who fled conflict in Burma and Somalia.
PEAULADD HUY was born in Phnom Penh. She was eight when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975. Her latest work was published at connotationpress.com/poetry/829-peauladd-huy-poetry, which was recently nominated for the Sundress Best of the Net, the Dzanc Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize (Connotation Press). Peauladd lives on the eastern coast of the U.S. with her husband and three children.
HILARY KROMBERG INGLIS grew up in South Africa at the height of the apartheid regime. As the daughter of a priest committed to social justice, she learned from a young age to fight inequality with every creative cell in her body. She and her husband run a media company, Jive Media Africa, producing materials for the not-for-profit sector. Hilary is the author of, most recently, the Everyday Heroes comic book series commissioned by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime for the Victim Empowerment Programme in South Africa. She is the mother of three children and lives in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa.
NIKOLINA KULIDŽAN was born in the former Yugoslavia. The war and displacement shaped her early life and are still at the heart of her writing. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Sun Magazine, Best New Writing 2010, Exquisite Corpse, Reed Magazine and other publications. Although she is continuously striving to put in practice the Buddhist idea of non-attachment to outcomes, she can’t help but hope that her novel Residence will sooner or later see the light of day. Kulidžan lives in Arlington, Virginia. “Across the River” was originally published in The Sun Magazine.
RENÉ COLATO LAÍNEZ is the award-winning author of many multicultural children’s books, including The Tooth Fairy Meets El Ratón Pérez, Playing Lotería and René Has Two Last Names. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Liberal Studies from Cal State, Northridge. He is a graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Writing for Children & Young Adults and a teacher at Fernangeles Elementary School in Sun Valley, California. There he is known as “the teacher full of stories.”
XIAOMEI LUCAS is a Lead QA Engineer for GE Oil & Gas in Houston, Texas. She is also the Chinese translator for Laura’s Children: The Hidden Story of a Chinese Orphanage, the story of her adoptive American grandmother’s efforts to save the lives of 200 Beijing-area children. Famine and war left these children without families or homes. Laura Richards, Xiaomei’s grandmother, lived in China between 1929 and 1951.
PHILLIP COLE MANOR is a poet, musician and traveler. He was a soldier during the Vietnam War, where he drove a 5,000-gallon fuel tanker. He experienced both the 1968 and 1969 Tet Offensives. When not writing or playing his guitar, he can be found walking the beach near his home in Morro Bay, California, or paddling a surfboard at sunset.
JERRY D. MATHES II is a Jack Kent Cooke Scholar alum and has had poems, essays and short stories published in The Southern Review, Shenandoah and Narrative. His most recent poetry collection is The Journal West. His forthcoming books are Fever and Guts: A Symphony (Stephen F. Austin Press), and Ahead of the Flaming Front (Caxton Press), a memoir about his wildfire experiences, due out in Spring 2013.
ANDIE MILLER is a freelance writer and editor who lives in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is a graduate of Wits University’s MA in Creative Writing programme. From 1993 to 2007, she worked for the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation as resource center manager and webmaster. In 2006, she received the Mondi Shanduka Newspaper Award for creative journalism, and in 2009, the Ernst van Heerden Creative Writing Award for Slow Motion, her collection of stories about walking, published by Jacana Media.
Following the fall of the shah of Iran in 1979 and the purges that targeted the progressive class, ARIA MINU-SEPEHR sought refuge in the U.S. He has lectured on issues concerning Iranian culture and foreign policy, and created and directed the Forum for Middle East Awareness at Susquehanna University, where he also taught world and Middle Eastern literature. He is the author of We Heard the Heavens Then, a memoir of a childhood in revolutionary Iran. He lives with his family in Oregon.
MARNIE MUELLER is the author of three novels: Green Fires, The Climate of the Country, and My Mother’s Island, which have garnered numerous awards. Her novels have been translated into German and Italian and all of her books have been optioned for film. She was recently hired to write the screenplay for My Mother’s Island. Her short stories, essays, reviews and poetry have been widely published and anthologized. She is currently at work on a nonfiction book, Triple Threat: The Story of a Japanese American Showgirl.
QAIS AKBAR OMAR set up a carpet-production workshop in Kabul during the time of the Taliban. With the fall of the Taliban, Qais completed his university education and taught himself English in order to work with the wave of foreigners coming into Afghanistan at that time. Qais’s memoir, A Fort of Nine Towers, will be published by Farrar Straus and Giroux in the United States in 2013. Qais lives in Kabul where he manages his family’s carpet business, Kabul Carpets & Kilims, and writes books.
BECKY CERLING POWERS is a writer and teaching artist who lives in Vinton, Texas. She is the editor and compiler of My Roots Go Back to Loving and Other Stories from “Year of the Family” and the author of Laura’s Children: The Hidden Story of a Chinese Orphanage, a nonfiction narrative account of the orphanage in which Xiaomei Lucas’ mother grew up.
J.L. POWERS is the author of two novels, The Confessional (Knopf) and This Thing Called the Future (Cinco Puntos Press). She is the editor of another anthology, Labor Pains and Birth Stories: Essays on Pregnancy, Birth, and Becoming a Parent, editor of the online magazine The Fertile Source (www.fertilesource.com) and founder of the collective on children’s literature and social justice issues, The Pirate Tree (www.thepiratetree.com). She blogs at www.jlpowers.net and www.motherwritermentor.com and is hard at work on her next novel.
A former Peace Corps Volunteer, DAVID YOST has served on development projects in the United States, Mali and Thailand. His fiction has appeared in more than thirty publications, including Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Witness, The Cincinnati Review and The Sun. He is an editor of the anthology Dispatches from the Classroom: Graduate Students on Creative Writing Pedagogy. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
ALIA YUNIS’ novel, The Night Counter (Crown/Random House 2010) was called “wonderfully imaginative…poignant, hilarious” by The Boston Globe. Alia is a PEN Emerging Voices Fellow and has worked as a filmmaker and journalist. Her fiction has appeared in several anthologies, including The Robert Olen Butler Best Short Stories collection. Her story on the world’s first female superhero will appear in the nonfiction collection Imagining the Arabian Nights (New York University Press, 2012). She currently teaches film and television at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi. She maintains a website at www.aliayunis.com.