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Maile Arvin was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and grew up in Kentucky and Hawaii, on the windward side of Oahu. She received a BA from Swarthmore College in 2005. She currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she works as a program assistant at the Asian & Pacific Islander Wellness Center, a nonprofit serving the A&PI communities, especially those A&PIs with or at risk for HIV/AIDS.

Rocky Choi was born in Oakland and raised in the East Bay.   He enjoys writing and playing soccer.

Elz Cuya has been writing poetry for 10 years, performing for 7. She co-hosts Spoken City, a curated, intergenerational literary series that was voted Best Spoken Word Night in San Francisco by 7x7 Magazine in June of 2006. She also serves on the editorial board for El Tecolote 's Literary Magazine. In 2000, Elz founded The Poetry Mission in San Francisco, the Mission District-based literary community that presents poetry, performance art and music. And through her succès d'estime , Poetry Mi ssion Thursdays @DALVA , Elz was named one of the Bay Area's Hot 20 Under 40 by 7x7 Magazine in 2005. Elz is the Marketing and Development Associate at Youth Speaks, a nonprofit literary arts organization.

Anita Daswani is co-editor of the book, What Every Programmer Needs to Know About Software Security" which will be published by Springer Publisher in August of 2006. She is also senior editor of the literary magazine, "Desilit Magazine." Her short story, "The Remnants of My Brother" was published in the chapbook 27 Hours . She received her MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College.

Mahru Elahi recently moved back to California, after teaching writing for five years in New York City public schools. Mahru earned her B.A. in American Studies from UC Santa Cruz and her Masters of Science in Teaching from New School University in New York City. Elahi participated in the Voices of Our Nations Writing Workshop, studying poetry with Ruth Forman. Her poetry has appeared in Fireweed, a Canadian journal, and she is the author of a graphic novel published by Fantagraphics Books. Mahru's writing will appear in the forthcoming anthology Iranian Women of the Diaspora from Feminist Press. This is her second year with WritersCorps.

Parnaz Foroutan was born in Iran to a Muslim father and a Jewish mother.   Parnaz attended UC Berkeley, worked for a while in the film industry and then dropped it all to go back to Iran and discover her identity. Parnaz later returned to the States and finished a Master's degree at UC Berkeley.   Currently, she teach social justice in the public school system.  

Gina Hotta is a radio producer and has received national awards for her documentary work including Which Way Home: Asian American Vietnam Veterans.   She also produces KPFA radio's Asian Pacific Islander show Apex Express which airs Thursdays at 7pm. The stories covered by her serve as the wellspring from which she writes fictional work. Gina's past written works have been non-fiction and have appeared in the local press and nonprofit publications. She is now branching out into other written forms; "Raised Up Here" is one of several short stories based in the Central Valley.

Meeta Kaur is a creative writer from Oakland, California.   She lives with her husband, Banjot Chanana, and a babe in her belly.   This child-to-be is not only expanding her waistline, but also her totality as a writer.   Meeta looks forward to what motherhood, family, writing, and the blending of all three will bring her.   She is a graduate of the Mills College MFA Creative Writing Program and has been awarded a 2006 Hedgebrook writing residency.   For now, every writing genre and form is alive and ripe with possibility, so stay tuned.

Jennifer Kong received her Master's in English from Stanford University, where she studied creative writing with ZZ Packer, Adam Johnson, Tom Kealey, and Katharine Noel. She was a participating writer in the Intergenerational Writers Lab 2006, co-sponsored by Kearny Street Workshop and Intersection for the Arts. Her work has appeared in the chapbook 27 Hours (Kearny Street Workshop Press) and Reorient Journal . A native Californian, Jennifer currently resides in San Francisco, where she is at work on a collection of short stories exploring sexuality and desire.

Tony Cuong Tuan Luong is a tireless ulcer prevention advocate. Tony dedicates hard-sought energy to the proliferation of imagination, the understanding of cultures, and the enjoyment of stories. He currently resides in San Francisco where he works as an Administrative Space Specialist II in a deeply-underground governmental office. Within the last year, Tony has finished a chief editorial commitment for the 13th edition of the Yellow Journal, and graduated S.F.S.U with a respectable G.P.A in both Asian American Studies, and Creative Writing. To fulfill a personal vendetta, Tony continues to this day, his lifelong quest to hunt down and film the elusive Yeti in its organic habitat.

Mojdeh Marashi is a San Francisco Bay Area writer and visual artist whose work is deeply influenced by the ancient and modern history of Iran where she grew up. One of her pieces was recently published in Let Me Tell You Where I¹ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora. Currently, she is working on a number of literary projects including co-translating a collection of poetry from H. E. Sayeh one of the most influential contemporary Iranian poets. Marashi also serves on the Board of Directors of Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco.

Mako Matsuda is an M.A. candidate in Creative Writing: Poetry at San Francisco State University, where he was a co-curator of the Velvet Revolution, a weekly reading series. He has been published in Lodestar Quarterly, Maganda, and The Yellow Journal. He can be contacted at Sing_your_life@yahoo.com .

Nirmala Nataraj is a writer and poet who grew up in Los Angeles, and has made the Bay Area her home for the past nine years. Nirmala is a playwright and former actress for No Nude Men Productions, a grassroots theater company with a focus on reviving obscure literary classics for contemporary audiences. Her work has been produced at Femina Potens Performance Space and Climate Theatre, both in San Francisco, and for the San Francisco Theater Festival, a free annual event held in the Yerba Buena Gardens, as well as the annual Queer Women of Color Film Festival. Aside from her creative work, Nirmala is a freelance editor and writes for various publications in the Bay Area, including SF Weekly and ArtWeek magazine.

Anh-Hoa Nguyen holds an MFA degree in Creative Writing from Mills College where she was awarded the Mary Merritt Henry Prize in Poetry and the ARdella Mills Literary Composition Prize in Creative Non-Fiction. Her poetry has been published in the Asian Pacific American Journal, Nha Magazine, The Walrus, and The Minnesota Daily. Anh-Hoa is also a book artist, printmaker, photographer, and performer. Anh-Hoa's self-published and hand-bound artist books and her photography series Of the Body have been displayed at the Asian Resource Gallery and Oaklandish Gallery in downtown Oakland. Anh-Hoa has recently completed an artist residency at Hedgebrook, a Writers-in-Residence program for women. She is also an active member of the Vietnamese Artists Collective and lives and creates in Oakland, California.

Born in Viet Nam, Nguyen Qui Duc came to America in 1975, and has also lived in England, Indonesia,  and Morocco. Since 2000 he has been the host of Pacific Time , KQED public radio?s  national program on Asia and Asian American affairs. His 20 years of experience in the media include positions with  the BBC (London), KALW (San   Francisco), and ethnic media companies in New   York and Los Angeles.  A former commentator for National Public Radio?s All Things Considered ,  he was awarded a Citation for  Excellence by the Overseas  Press Club of America in 1989 for his NPR documentary series on Viet Nam.  He was named One of 25 Most Notable Asian Americans in 2001 by  A-Media. Duc is the author of Where The Ashes Are, the Odyssey of a  Vietnamese Family , and editor and translator of several books, including The  Time Tree , Poems by Huu Thinh, a finalist for the 2003 Translation Award by the Northern California Book Reviewers Association. He has published numerous  essays and short stories in major newspapers, literary magazines, and several  anthologies.

Born and raised in Pittsburg, CA, Josephine Penano was a free spirited child who made friends with no color lines. She attended San Francisco State to seek diversity as well as live the worry-free college life. Her spirituality got her through and she was able to accept her weaknesses and find her strengths through SFSU's weekly open-mics. Life after the first greeting with the "mic" was never the same. Josephine was blessed to leave her last semester of five years in college with Professor Allyson Tintianco-Cubales. All she did was tell her class that they were the writers and poets of the 21st century. Josephine found herself standing on the stage in front of her family as the grueling years of a lost identity culminated into a night "the I Hotel and I survived..."

Han Pham is a storyteller. Her stories have been featured on the radio, in the McGraw-Hill anthology Encounters: Essays for Exploration and Inquiry , and in publications including the non-fiction webzine Ostrich Ink, Hyphen Magazine, and Nguoi Viet. She has also written, choreographed, and performed for the Vietnamese theater ensemble Club O?Noodles, on both stage and film. She is active in the Asian American art community as a performer, artist, and producer. Han?s upcoming projects include As Is , an anthology of Vietnamese art ande writing by the Vietnamese Art Collective.

Proletariat Bronze is built of our parents and our own working class struggles and desires, and is a collective movement of Pilipino American blue collar poets simultaneously existing as writers, slam poets, counselors, activists, students, artists, waiters, truck drivers, and more. Proletariat Bronze is Jason Bayani (2003 Berkeley/SF Unified Grand Slam Champion), Mesej 1 (2005 Oakland Grand Slam Champion), Jaylee Alde (2005 Berkeley Grand Slam Champion and the #2 ranked individual poet at the 2004 National Poetry Slam).

Carrie Y Takahata graduated from Moanalua High School and obtained a BSW in Social Work, and an MA in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.   She's co-founder and co-editor of Hybolics, a literary magazine in Hawaii dedicated to publishing new and emerging voices.   She has written for the Honolulu Weekly and has seen her poetry published in Asian Pacific American Journal, Bamboo Ridge, Tinfish, Hawaii Review, and Social Process in Hawaii.

In quest to decipher human emotion and uplift spirit, Ruby Veridiano-Ching translates the language of the heart through the scope of a poet's intuition. Ruby seeks to awaken new hope within her community by offering honesty in expression and a voice sincere in vulnerability. A Pinay poet and member of performing arts collective iLL-Literacy, she has performed both nationally and internationally, touring universities such as George Washington, Columbia, the American University of Paris, Auburn, Stanford, SF State, UCLA, and her alma mater UC Davis, where the iLL-Literacy family was founded. Dedicating recent years to time spent in the Philippines, Italy, France, and the Bay, Ruby continues to harvest inspiration from her external environments and a breath of new air to the mic. Continuing to push the literary aesthetic in spoken word, she proves that poetry isn't subject to the confines of the page, but is very much alive, and thriving, on stage. She is proud to call the Bay home.  

sottolin weng is a 1.5 generation immigrant whose Chinese ancestors have lived in Vietnam and Taiwan. Ze lives on the border of gender territories and is trying to create visions of community that cross boundaries of ethnicity, race, gender, and sexual orientation. sottolin is a recent "refugee" from the overly straight and wealthy city of Santa Barbara. Her poetry is featured in Tea Party magazine and soon to appear in an anthology featuring the work of East Bay lesbians.

Rene Yung is a San Francisco-based artist, writer, and designer.   Her cross-disciplinary works explore issues of culture and community, and language and form.   She is at work on a series of essays on transcultural living, and a multimedia theater work on the Transcontinental Railroad.   A native of Hong Kong, Rene graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in Art.   She is an alumna of the Squaw Valley Community of writers, Hedgebrook Writers' Residency Program, and Headlands Center for the Arts, and the recipient of a Creative Work Fund award.

Christine Lee Zilka is an MFA student in creative writing at Mills College in Oakland, where she won an Ardella Mills prize in fiction.  A recipient of a Hedgebrook writing residency, her fiction has appeared in the literary journal ZYZZYVA and she has a novel-in-progress.  Her nonfiction appears regularly in asia! magazine and on her blog (she hates that word, by the way, it sounds like a belch).  She lives in Berkeley with her husband and two wiener dogs.  As a Jewish Korean, she celebrates Passover, and is sufficiently filled with guilt about most things.

Jenny Zhang graduated from Stanford University in 2005 with a BA in Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity and a minor in Creative Writing. Before working at nonprofit arts organization 826Valencia she worked as a union organizer for monolingual Chinese homecare workers in San Francisco. She received a President's Scholars grant from Stanford, which provided her the opportunity to spend a summer in Paris studying expatriate artist communities. While in Paris she worked on a collection of travel stories inspired by the racism, romanticism, and utter joyfulness she encountered   while in Europe. She co-edited the fiction anthology Politically Inspired with Stephen Elliott and is currently at work on a collection of linked short stories that touch on the themes of immigration, family, and displacement.