Dee Allen. is an African-Italian performance poet currently based in Oakland, California. Active on the creative writing and spoken word tips since the early ’90s, he’s the author of three books, Boneyard, Unwritten Law, and most recently Stormwater, and appears in 12 anthologies including Poets 11: 2014, Feather Floating On The Water, and the first four Revolutionary Poets Brigade books including Rise, among other titles. He is working on a fourth book.
Jorge Tetl Argueta is an award-winning author of picture books and poetry for young children. He is also the founder of La Biblioteca de los Sueños/Library of Dreams in El Salvador. He has won the International Latino Book Award, the Américas Book Award, the NAPPA Gold Award, the Independent Publisher Book Award for Multicultural Fiction for Juveniles, and the Lee Bennet Poetry Award. His books have also been named to the Américas Award Commended List, the USBBY Outstanding International Books Honor List, Kirkus Reviews Best Children’s Books, and the Cooperative Children’s Book Center Choices. A native Salvadoran and Pipil-Nahua Indian, Jorge spent much of his life in rural El Salvador. He now lives in San Francisco, California, where he is Poet Laureate of the San Francisco Public Libraries.
Peter Case moved to San Francisco at age 18. A founding member of The Nerves and leader of The Plimsouls, he is a singer-songwriter, performer, and producer with 13 solo albums to his credit, including his self-titled T Bone Burnett-produced debut, the Grammy-nominated Let Us Now Praise Sleepy John, and HWY 62. He is also the author of a memoir, As Far As You Can Get Without A Passport (Ever-themore Books). After thirty years of LA living, he has returned to San Francisco.
Patsy Creedy has lived and worked in San Francisco for nearly thirty years. She has always loved poetry but has branched out into creative non-fiction and plain ole fiction. She recently completed an MA in creative writing, and now is pursuing an MFA at SF State. She works as a nurse, helping women deliver their babies. She has raised two tall children, and is an avid surfer.
Kelly Dessaint drives a San Francisco taxi and writes a weekly column about his misadventures in the city streets for the SF Examiner. An LA native exiled in Oakland with his wife and daughter, he is a veteran of the small press, the author of the novel A Masque of Infamy and currently publishes the personal narrative zine Piltdownlad. While he pledges allegiance to no baseball team, if he did, it would be the Giants.
Stefanie Doucette has finally found a home for herself in San Francisco, where she lives with two roommates and an impressively large plant collection. Born in Boston, MA and raised on a strong diet of feminism and early American ghostlore, she has a BA from the University of Vermont, and writes for The Bold Italic when not serving people beer.
Lynell George is a Los Angeles-based journalist, essayist and photographer. She has written for KCET’s Artbound, Los Angeles Times, the LA Weekly, and she taught journalism at Loyola Marymount University. She is the author of No Crystal Stair: African Americans in the City of Angels (Verso/Doubleday).
John Goins, author of A Portrait in the Tenderloin and The Coptic Cross, was born in the southeast section of Washington, DC. He has worked as a dishwasher, library clerk, gardener, English teacher in Istanbul, telephone solicitor, phlebotomist and lab assistant. He also wrote briefly for the Central City Extra, a monthly newspaper for the Civic Center, Tenderloin, and Sixth Street Corridor. He lives and writes in San Francisco where he has resided, for the most part, since 1985. He published A Portrait in the Tenderloin, featuring reporter Bill Haywood, with Ithuriel’s Spear in 2013.
E. Hagan is a sailboat powered by winds mysterious even to herself. A native Michigander, travels have taken her from Tibet to Appalachia, but she feels at home for the first time on the California coast. Currently tucked away under a zen mountain, E. earns her keep as a gardener on borrowed valley land. She is interested in exploring possibilities of the dream world, the symbolism of rocks and stars, how to hear an ancient story, the power of ritual and disengaging from social power structures. This is her first publication.
Michael Koch is a poet, translator, visual artist, and amateur percussionist whose Jamaican/Slavic roots only partly explain his passion for syncopation and absurdity. His published work has appeared in, among others, Beatitude, Hanging Loose, Toad Suck Review, River Styx, Five Fingers Review, Nicotine Soup, Durak, and Third Rail. His translations also appear in the City Lights anthology of contemporary Cuban poetry, Island of My Hunger, and the City Lights collection of contemporary Mexican poetry, Light from a Nearby Window.
Raluca Ioanid was born in communist Romania and raised in capitalist New York City. By day, she is a Family Nurse Practitioner at a community health center in Fruitvale, Oakland. By night, she is a traveling, trapeze flying, writer of stories. Her work has appeared in The Sun, Riverbabble, and So To Speak.
Sylvia J. Martínez is a writer and adult school ESL teacher. Her work has appeared in In Media Res: Stories from the In-Between (WriteSpace), the East Bay Review, Cipactli, Word Riot, Tattoo Highway, and the San Francisco Examiner, among others. She earned her MFA from San Francisco State and is working on her first collection of stories. She lives in the SF Bay Area with her husband, two teenage children, and dog.
Alvin Orloff is the author of three whimsical queer novels: I Married an Earthling, Gutter Boys, and Why Aren’t You Smiling? and co-author of The Unsinkable Bambi Lake, a transgender showbiz memoir. He currently works at Dog Eared Books Castro, a quaint neighborhood bookstore, and continues to write, his latest project being a book about crazy, slutty club kids during the height of the AIDS crisis. He worries that life is passing him by, so if you invite him to do something (contribute to your magazine, appear in your movie, lecture your Creative Writing class, go out for drinks, what have you) the answer will almost certainly be “yes.”
Tony Robles is a born and raised San Franciscan poet and children’s author. Like his uncle, the late Manilatown and I-Hotel poet Al Robles, he is referred to as “The People’s Poet.” Author of the poetry/short story collection Cool Don’t Live Here No More: A Letter to San Francisco and the forthcoming Fingerprints of a Hunger Strike (Ithuriel’s Spear Press), he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Mythium Journal for his short story, “In My Country”. He has been a recipient of the San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant.
Alice Elizabeth Rogoff has MAs in Creative Writing and Drama from San Francisco State University, and a BA in Anthropology from Grinnell College. She has been published in Caveat Lector, Pudding Magazine, Borderlands, and Black Maria. She has two books of poetry, Mural and Barge Wood. She has received an Individual Cultural Equity Commission from the San Francisco Arts Commission.
Broke-Ass Stuart aka Stuart Schuffman is a TV host, a travel writer, a poet, a San Francisco Examiner columnist, a former mayoral candidate, and a motherfucking hustler.
Shizue Seigel is a third-generation Japanese American writer and visual artist who has lived in San Francisco since 1958. She loves the city’s ever-changing diversity, but misses the Fillmore, the old Mission, and Japantown, fog and foghorns, working docks, the Belt Line. Her books include In Good Conscience: Supporting Japanese Americans during the Internment, Century of Change: the Memoirs of Nellie Nakamura, Distillations: Meditations on the Japanese American Experience, and Standing Strong: Fillmore and Japantown. Her poetry and prose have been published in numerous anthologies and journals, and recognized by the National League of American PEN Women. Her work is archived at UC Santa Barbara’s California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives, and solo exhibitions of her visual art include Laramie: Mapping Myths and Realities, Double Vision: A Celebration of Hybridity, and Ephemeral Allure; Eternal Struggle at UC Santa Barbara. Her latest project, Endangered Species, is forthcoming.
Kim Shuck is a jester, activist, bead artist, poet, and San Franciscan. Shuck has authored three full-length books and one chapbook, including her latest, Clouds Running In (Taurean Horn Press). In 2017, she was named Poet Laureate of San Francisco.
Don Skiles is the author of Miss America and Other Stories, The James Dean Jacket Story, and the novel Football. His collection of short fiction, Rain After Midnight was published in 2017 by Pelekinesis Press. He lives in San Francisco.
Anna Maria Smith is a native San Franciscan now living in Los Angeles, where she dreams of Muni buses, the San Francisco Giants, and the Golden Gate Bridge. She is the owner of ZiBoom, an international community for individuals over the age of 45. In her spare time, she is happily married to Sam and takes orders from four dogs.
Barbara Stauffacher Solomon is a Swiss-trained graphic designer with a masters degree in architecture. An award-winning landscape artist, she conceived the signage and supergraphics at The Sea Ranch, Ghirardelli Square, and the Ribbon of Light along the Embarcadero in San Francisco. Her books, Green Architecture & The Agrarian Garden, Plays on a Page, Good Mourning California, Why?WhyNot?, UtopiaMyopia, and Super-Silly-Us are pix and prose juxtaposed, each a series of drawings plus text, hand typeset and pasted up on 8-1/2 x 11 sheets of paper.
Denise Sullivan is a fourth generation San Franciscan who writes about music, arts and culture, and her hometown. She has lived in Atlanta, Los Angeles, and again in San Francisco, has contributed to dozens of newspapers, magazines, websites, and reference books,, and has published six titles , including Keep on Pushing: Black Power Music From Blues to Hip Hop (Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review Press).
Norman Antonio Zelaya was born and raised in San Francisco. He has published stories in ZYZZYVA, NY Tyrant, 14 Hills, Cipactli, and Apogee Journal, among others, and was a 2015 Zoetrope: All-Story finalist. He is a founding member of Los Delicados, and has performed extensively throughout the US with them. Zelaya has appeared on stage, in film, and in the squared circle as luchador, Super Pulga. Currently, he lives and works in San Francisco’s Mission District as a special education teacher. Orlando & Other Stories is his first published book.