Steve Berman resides in southern New Jersey. As an editor of queer anthologies, he has been a finalist for the Golden Crown Literary Award, Lambda Literary Award, and Shirley Jackson Award.
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Jean Roberta lives on the Canadian prairies, where the vastness of sky encourages daydreaming, and the long winters encourage indoor communication. She has taught English at the local university for over twenty-five years, and now teaches creative writing there as well. She married Mirtha, her Chilean-born partner, on Samhain weekend 2010 in the local LGBT club, the only one left on the continent that is still community-run.
The “spooky stories” Jean used to tell to her younger sisters eventually led to several student writing awards and to a first book of lesbian short stories in 1988. With encouragement from friends who wanted to see more explicit sex in her fiction, she began sending out her erotica in the 1990s.
Since then, her diverse short stories (mostly erotic) have appeared in print anthologies from both sides of the Atlantic, including eight editions of Best Lesbian Erotica, and in several sadly-missed journals and websites that have disappeared. Her eclectic story collection, Obsession, is still available, as is The Princess and the Outlaw: Tales of the Torrid Past, and The Flight of the Black Swan: A Bawdy Novella (also in audio form).
In other genres, her play, Smoke and Mirrors, was performed in a festival of queer one-act plays by the local theater company in 2004. The opinion pieces she wrote for a monthly column, Sex Is All Metaphors (based on a line in a poem by Dylan Thomas), 2008-2010, are available as an e-book by that title from Coming Together, which raises money for various good causes. (Writers donate their work.)
Under her family name, Jean discusses teaching in a pedagogical anthology, The Vampire Goes to College: Essays on Teaching with the Undead (2013). With Dr. Wes Pearce, she co-edited an anthology based on a queer faculty presentation series: OutSpoken: Perspectives on Queer Identities (2013), which includes her article on a controversial 1928 “lesbian” novel, The Well of Loneliness.
Jean has given talks on the history of erotica and literary censorship, and has promised to write a book on controversy over subject-matter, at least partly based on stranger-than-fiction experience. She needs a sabbatical. Meanwhile, you can find her opinions here: www.ohgetagrip.blogspot.com and here: www.erotica-readers.blogspot.com
Her reviews appear regularly in The Gay & Lesbian Review.
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