Amanda Jimenez was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey. She received her BA in English/Women’s Studies from Hood College in Frederick, Maryland. In need of more city and less cows, she decided to come back north and pursue her MFA in Creative Writing. Her writing has changed a lot throughout her time at Emerson, but she has been obsessed with magical realism and sex for a while.
Currently, she lives in Boston and spends her free time planning a kick-ass wedding.
Alex Strum is originally from Holliston, Mass. He lived in New York for six years before moving back to attend grad school at Emerson College, where he is now in his third year as an MFA fiction candidate. He will be reading an eclectic mix of short shorts. His current cell phone ring tone is "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley.
Sophie Grimes, originally from Chicago, completed her undergrad at Oberlin College. She majored in both Creative Writing, and East Asian Studies with a focus in Chinese Language. After graduating, she spent two years in Kunming, China as an Oberlin Shansi fellow. There, she taught English and continued to study Mandarin. Sophie is currently at Boston University pursuing an MFA in poetry. She is also teaching BU undergrads creative writing, showing them the awesomeness of language and the cool things you can do with it.
Antonio Elefano is a fiction writer and playwright currently living in
Boston, MA. He grew up in Port Neches, Texas and received his BA in
English from Texas A&M University. He is a two-time Charles Gordone
Award winner for Best Fiction of 2001 and Best Play of 2002. In 2005,
he received his JD from Yale Law School and through the summer of 2010
practiced corporate law at Kaye Scholer LLP in New York. He is
currently working toward his MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) at
Boston University.
S.D. Mullaney is currently pursuing his MFA in Poetry at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His first full-length collection of poems, Follow the Wolf Moon, appeared in January 2005. His poems have appeared and/or will appear in The New York Review, Hanging Loose, Breakwater, and Hoi Polloi. He is a regular contributor to the online political journal Pemmican. Other work has been featured on WOMR 92.1 FM, Radio Provincetown and WERS 88.9 FM, Boston.
Andra Hibbert is a queer writer pursuing an MFA in fiction at UMass Boston. She grew up in northern Vermont and attended Williams College. Before focusing on understanding people (mainly herself) through telling stories she tried to understand them through analyzing demographic data. She prefers words, but misses right answers. She has worked as an editor for Breakwater Review and Concrete.