Hey! My name is Elian Garcia Carbone. That's Syrian, Mexican and Italian respectively. It's a colorful combination that drives my passion for community, narrative, movement and song.

Since being a teenager, and through living abroad in India, Spain, Dominican Republic, South Africa, Cuba or New Zealand, I’ve carried a little notebook in my back pocket, ready to jot down the next "big" lyric. These songwriting notebooks have archived my connections to people and places and it is these relational stories that most readily inform my songwriting style. I currently work in operations at the Bellingham Food Bank and as Co-coordinator for the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop. I teach Cuban salsa dancing and am pursuing my masters in counseling psychology.

For the last two years, I have been a part of the most supportive songwriting group. It's a full life! What's the glue? I'm still figuring that out...It's a pleasure to meet you!

Kate Gray's passion stems from teaching and volunteering. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, two full-length poetry collections, and one novel. Kate and her partner live in a pine-and-oak forest in the mid-Columbia River Gorge with two impetuous dogs, Wasco and Snickers. Currently, Kate is wrestling with an old novel and a new form, flash fiction.

As a Filipino American writer and performance storyteller, my art is based on the impact of heritage on shaping and informing personal experience and the importance of self-expression as a method of healing. I view my writing and performing as subversive acts against invisibility and silence in a society where women of color are often viewed through an objectifying, exoticizing lens. Raised in a family focused on assimilation, I grew up sheltered from the Vietnam War and the Marcos dictatorship by a shield of language. Becoming a socially aware cultural activist has been a process of understanding the impact of the American Dream trope on my family and upbringing. As a result, I have connected with diverse ethnic groups who also value art as a method of self-expression and an act of compassion. A desire for wholeness drives my art which seeks to weave past and present, folktale with fact, subjectivity with objectivity into works which entertain and enliven others.

Jennifer Perrine is the author of four books of poetry: Again, The Body Is No Machine, In the Human Zoo, and No Confession, No Mass. Perrine's recent poems, stories, and essays appear in The Missouri Review, New Letters, Pleiades, Harpur Palate, Buckman Journal, and The Gay & Lesbian Review. A resident of Portland, Oregon, Perrine co-hosts the Incite:Queer Writers Read series, teaches creative writing, and serves as a wilderness guide. www.jenniferperrine.org