About Us: Who We Are

Who We Are

Sarah Brownd, Reviews Editorial Assistant, is a copyeditor for The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. Her professional background is in technical editing and writing, although her first love (and undergrad major) is poetry writing. Sarah lives in Memphis, Tennessee, with her husband and toddler daughter Sophie.

Melinda Copp, copyeditor in Fiction, is a writer and freelance editor who lives in Bluffton, South Carolina with her fiance and son. She is currently working on her MFA in creative nonfiction at Goucher College.

Elrena Evans,("Birthing: A Process in Vignettes" and "The Journey Home") is the Marketing and Publicity Manager for Literary Mama and writes the column Me and My House. She holds an MFA from The Pennsylvania State University, and together with Literary Mama Senior Editor Caroline Grant is co-editor of Mama, PhD: Women Write about Motherhood and Academic Life (Rutgers University Press 2008). Her writing appears in the anthologies Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers (Random House 2006) and How to Fit a Car Seat on a Camel (Seal Press 2008), as well as in Brain, Child, Episcopal Life, Hip Mama, and Relief. She lives in Pennsylvania with her family, and blogs at her website.

Vicki Forman, Reviews Editor, ("Dear Friend", and the archived column, "Special Needs Mama") teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart and has appeared in the Seneca Review and the Santa Monica Review, as well as the anthologies, Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child With Special Needs, This Day: Dairies From American Women, The Spirit of Pregnancy and Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined. She lives in Southern California with her husband and daughter. You can contact her at vickiforman(@)gmail.com or visit her blog.

Caroline Grant (A Conversation with Gail Baker; Mama Sez: Literary Reflections), Senior Editor, writes the column Mama at the Movies for Literary Mama. She is also co-editor, with Elrena Evans, of the anthology Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life (Rutgers University Press, 2008). She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley, where she taught classes on film, women's studies, American literature, and writing; she has also taught at Stanford University and the San Francisco Art Institute. Her essays have been published in MotherVerse, HipMama, The Ultimate Christmas and A Cup of Comfort for New Mothers. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and two sons, a life she writes about on her blog, food for thought.

Kate Haas, Creative Nonfiction Editor, is a writer and freelance editor. Before parenthood, she worked in editorial production at the New England Journal of Medicine, taught blind students in the Peace Corps in Morocco, and was a high school English teacher on both coasts. She writes about it all in Miranda, her zine about motherhood and other adventures. Kate's essays have been published in Brain, Child, The Mothers Movement Online, and Mamazine.com. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two sons.

Joanne Catz Hartman ("Evolution of a Muse"), Profiles Editor, lives with her husband and daughter in northern California. She wrote the column "Mother Angst" for Literary Mama and was also a columnist for San Francisco's J . Her work appears in the anthologies Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined, Using Our Words, and The Knitter's Gift. Prior to motherhood, she worked for a New England public television station on an award-winning feature magazine show, was a reporter and photographer for a sailing magazine, an editor at a wire service, and spent a decade teaching middle school.

Jenny Hobson, Profiles Copyeditor, lives, blogs, knits, and does GIS in an Ohio River town in West Virginia. She lives with her husband and preschooler daughter. Her blog can be found at Hobson's Choice.

Sonya Huber (Dad, In Red, In Media Res), Creative Nonfiction Editor, is an assistant professor of creative writing at Georgia Southern University. Her first book of fiction and creative nonfiction, Opa Nobody (University of Nebraska Press, 2008), opens an imaginary conversation with her long-dead anti-Nazi German grandfather about the way to combine a private life with public responsibilities and political passions. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Literary Mama, Fourth Genre, Passages North, Kaleidoscope, and Hotel Amerika; in three anthologies from Seal Press; in Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined, in the anthology Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life (Rutgers University Press, 2008) and other anthologies; and in The Chronicle of Higher Education, In These Times, and Earth Island Journal. Sonya is a Midwesterner who lives with her husband and son, Ivan, in Statesboro, Georgia. More info at www.sonyahuber.com.

Amy Hudock, Ph. D., Founding Co-Editor, teaches English at an independent college prep school in South Carolina, where she lives with her daughter. She is the co-editor of Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined (Seal Press 2006) and American Women Prose Writers, 1820-1870 (Gale 2001), and the author of scholarly essays on nineteenth-century American women writers. Her memoir writing about motherhood has appeared in the anthologies A Cup of Comfort for New Mothers, Mama PhD (2008), Cup of Comfort for Single Mothers (2008), Chicken Soup for the Soul: A Tribute to Mothers (2008), and Single State of the Union (2007). Her work has also appeared in periodical publications such as Skirt!, ePregnancy, Pregnancy and Baby, Philosophical Mother. She’s also published here at Literary Mama: Single Mom Fantasy, The River, A Journey to the Past, Down into the Mine, Father Writing: Floundering or Flourishing?, Happy Birthday to Literary Mama, Why Start a Pregnancy Journal?, and How to Publish a Book. You can read her LM interview and discussions about mothering in her archived column Mothering in the Ivory Tower, and at Single Mothering Southern Style.

Merle Huerta, Literary Reflections Editorial Assistant, is an army chaplain’s wife, a religious Jew, and a mother of a blended family of thirteen; she has a Bachelors in Psychology from University of Pittsburgh, and a Masters in Instructional Media and Technology from Columbia University. During her husband’s first combat deployment to Iraq in 2003, she began co-writing articles about his experiences at the front. The series, “Notes from the Front,” published in the West Point PointerView, was to serve as an educational travelogue for military cadets at the U.S. Academy who were facing almost certain deployment after graduation. Some of their articles have been published in The Jerusalem Post, The Jewish Press, and National Review. Currently, she is studying non-fiction with New York editors at The Writers’ Institute, a specialized graduate-level writing program at CUNY. Much of her writing focuses on the human element, how we survive and emerge victorious after devastating life circumstances. Merle resides in West Point, New York, home to the U.S. Military Academy.

Stephanie Hunt, Columns Editor, lives in Charleston, South Carolina, with her husband and three daughters. Stephanie is a contributing editor to Skirt Magazine, Charleston Magazine, and SOMA Review. A graduate of Duke University and Vanderbilt Divinity School, she specializes in personal essays and profiles, and has published Peeking Under My Skirt, an essay collection.

Susan Ito, Creative Nonfiction Editor, lives in Oakland with her husband, two daughters and mother and writes the column Life in the Sandwich for Literary Mama. She teaches writing privately and at UC Berkeley Extension. She is the co-editor of A Ghost At Heart's Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption (North Atlantic Books). Her essays and fiction have appeared in Growing Up Asian American, Hip Mama, Making More Waves, the Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. She writes regularly in her weblog ReadingWritingLiving.

Suzanne Kamata, Fiction Editor, lives with her Japanese husband and bi-cultural twins on the island of Shikoku in Japan. She is the author of a novel, Losing Kei, and editor of the anthologies, Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs and The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan. The author of numerous stories, essays, articles and reviews, her writing about motherhood appears in the anthologies It's a Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons, It's a Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters, Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined, and elsewhere.

Rebecca Kaminsky, a Founding Editor and Reviews Editor, is a writer who lives in Berkeley, California, with her spouse and two sons. Her work has appeared in Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined (Seal Press, Jan. 2006), as well as the locally best-selling anthology Wednesday Writers: Ten Years of Writing Women's Lives. Rebecca writes the column Down Will Come Baby for Literary Mama, and she has been a guest blogger for The Washington Post. She holds a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies with a concentration in Women's Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center.

Sarah Raleigh Kilts, Literary Reflections Editor, lives with her daughter and husband in the San Francisco Bay Area. A member of the Berkeley-based Motherlode Writers group, her work has been published in Common Ties and Literary Mama. She is currently working on her first novel which is heavily influenced by her French-Canadian-Irish-Catholic upbringing in rural Vermont. In her spare time, Sarah plays bass and sings with her husband, Tom, in their band, Diablo’s Dust.

Sharon Kraus, Poetry Editor, is the author of two books of poetry, Generation (1997), and Strange Land (2002), and is still just finishing her third (revolving around motherhood). Recent poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Diagram, Slope, La Petite Zine, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and 6-year-old son.

Shireen Advani Lee, Creative Nonfiction Copyeditor, lives in Singapore with her husband and daughter. Shireen is an attorney who practiced in-house corporate law in California before moving to Singapore in 2006. Shireen has been published in Singapore American Newspaper and One Magazine. Shireen maintains a blog, Beansprout Chronicle, about her adventures as an expatriate mom.

Sybil Lockhart ("Grey"), Reviews Editor, is a compulsive journal-writer with a Ph.D. in cell and molecular biology. She has taught high school French and English, done research in developmental neurobiology, and taught neuroscience at U.C. Berkeley. Her recent essays can be found in Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined and Using Our Words: Moms and Dads on Raising Kids in the Modern Neighborhood, and her writing has also appeared in Brandeis University's Artemis Magazine, The Journal of Neuroscience, and The Journal of Neurobiology. One of her children's nature stories is forthcoming in Ladybug Magazine, and her essay "Naked" was chosen for a forthcoming Alzheimer's Anthology. Sybil is currently at work on her book, Early Stages: a Biologist's Tale of Mothering and Daughtering, a scientific memoir rooted in the stories told in her column, Mama in the Middle. Sybil lives in Berkeley, California with her husband and two daughters.

Alissa McElreath ("Alice"), Columns Department Editor, teaches English at a small, private college in North Carolina, where she lives with her husband and two children (7 and almost 4). She chronicles her life as a mother, writer, and teacher on her blog. Starting in January of 2008 she'll be writing for the Family Education Network. Her essay, "That Mommy Thing," appears in Mama Ph.D. (Rutgers University Press, 2008).

Amy S. Mercer ("Solitaire", "The Birth of Readers", "Not Alone" and Chronic Mama), Blog Editor, is a freelance writer who lives in Charleston, SC with her husband Dale and sons, Will and Miles. She writes creative nonfiction and short stories; her personal essays have been published in Skirt! Magazine, Byline Magazine, Diabetes Forecast and A Cup Of Comfort for Writers. She is a board member of the South Carolina Writer's Workshop, and works as an intern for Crazyhorse, the literary Magazine for The College of Charleston. Amy writes the blog Dreaming About Water, about growing up with diabetes.

Kathy Moran ("A Kite in November"), Literary Reflections Editor, has two grown boys and three granddaughters. A retired secondary language arts teacher and literary magazine adviser, Kathy currently works as a teacher consultant for the Greater Kansas City Writing Project and editor of their newsletter Composing Ourselves. Kathy's reflections can be found at Marmee's Corner.

Kristina Riggle ("What Kind of Mother") is a former newspaper reporter and mother to a preschool son and baby daughter. Her short fiction has also appeared in Espresso Fiction, Net Author's E2K, and the Cimarron Review. Her debut novel, Real Life and Liars, will be published by Avon Harper Collins in the summer of 2009. She is co-editor for fiction here at Literary Mama. She can be reached through her website, www.kristinariggle.net.

Jessica DeVoe Riley, E-zine Editor, grew up in the South, and then moved to Southern California, where she lives and writes in the company of her husband and two children. Her short stories have won the South West Writers competition and placed in several others. She is published in Thema, has an essay forthcoming in Marginalia, and her blog posts have been featured in 5 Minutes for Parenting. You can contact her at her blog, All Rileyed Up.

Lisa Moskowitz Sadikman, Profiles Editor, is a writer and editor living in Oakland, California with her husband and daughter. She holds a BA from Duke University and an MJ from the University of California at Berkeley. Her work has appeared in Salon, Attaché, Red Herring, Business 2.0 and PC World, as well as the Travelers’ Tales Greece and The Real Las Vegas: Life Beyond the Strip anthologies. Currently, she is working on a series of essays about a road trip she and her mom took back to the places of her mother’s childhood. Before becoming a parent, Lisa worked as a Content and User Interface Strategist at a now defunct Internet consulting firm. As a mother, she knows job security is no longer an issue. You can read about her journey into motherhood at her weblog.

Maria Scala, Columns Editor (Vigil at Four Months), is a freelance writer and editor who lives in Toronto with her husband and daughter. Her poetry and non-fiction have appeared in Descant, PoetryReviews.ca, mamazine, Between O and V, among others. You can find Maria blogging on August Avenue.

C. Delia Scarpitti, Columns Department Editor, is a freelance writer, poet and mother of three young children. Her poetry, fiction, essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in a variety of online and print publications, including Mothering Magazine, The We’Moon Anthology: Love, SageWoman Magazine, Literary Mama, Mamazine.com, Mom Writer’s Literary Magazine, The Apple Valley Review, and Natural Family Magazine, where she served as the Reviews Editor until the magazine’s hiatus. Delia lives with her family in a little white house with a tree swing in the front yard where she writes her novel, dreams of poetry, and maintains her website and blog.

Irena Smith, Columns Department Editorial Assistant, emigrated from the former Soviet Union with her parents at the age of nine. In spite of her belief that she would never, not ever, learn to speak English, she has in fact done so, and holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA. She lives in Palo Alto, California, with her husband and three children, drives a minivan, works as a college consultant, and teaches literature and composition at Notre Dame de Namur University. She has published academic essays on Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov, and her essay, "Failure to Progress," will be appearing in Mama Ph.D. (Rutgers University Press, 2008).

Christina Speed, Literary Reflections Assistant Editor, lives in Virgina Beach, Virginia, and is a married mother of two, uber-spirited boys under the age of 6. She has lived in cities abroad and in the US, teaching elementary school in some, and being a mom and homemaker in others. She has written a monthly parenting column in the Lahontan Valley News, has a blog at speedwrites.com, and is an aspiring author on two fronts: children's books and intercultural marriage.

Nicole Stellon O’Donnell, Columns Editor, is a poet and essayist who lives in Fairbanks, Alaska with her husband and two daughters. Her poetry has appeared in various literary magazines, including Ice Floe, The Women’s Review of Books, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Prairie Schooner. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Anchorage Daily News and as commentaries for the Alaska Public Radio Network. With the support of a grant from the Rasmuson Foundation, she’s currently working on a book of persona poems about the life of Sarah Ellen Gibson, who in 1903 decided to start her life over in Fairbanks.

Shari MacDonald Strong, Senior Editor, ("The Great, Death-Defying Father") writes the "Zen and the Art of Child Maintenance" column. Her essay, "On Wanting a Girl," appears in the anthology, It's a Girl, and she has been published in a number of publications, including Geez magazine. Shari worked as an editor and copywriter in the publishing industry for 15 years. She writes a blog from her home in Portland, Oregon, where she lives with her husband, photojournalist Craig Strong, and their children: grade-schooler Eugenia, born in Russia, and preschool sons Will and Mac, born via gestational surrogacy.

Marie Walden, E-Zine Editor, lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado with her husband and six children. After a number of years as a stay-at-home mom and community volunteer, she returned to the workforce as a CPA and found that putting on panty hose and pumps was infinitely less enjoyable than wearing pajama pants and Uggs. She quit her job, turned her living room into a lovely workspace, and took up writing and other soul-nurturing arts with fervor. She currently blogs for Not My Tribe and Wanderlust and Lipstick and is writing a book on financial savvy for newlywed women.

Sarah Weld ("An Interview with Rachel Sarah"), Profiles Editor, lives in Oakland, California with her husband and two children. She has worked as a daily reporter for The Oakland Tribune and the San Mateo County Times, in marketing for Publishers Group West, taught high school English, and edited the Neighborhood Parents Network newsletter. Her writing has also appeared in Using Our Words: Moms and Dads on Raising Kids in the Modern Neighborhood, The East Bay Monthly, and The Nob Hill Gazette.




Read the Introduction Literary Mama Home Columns Creative Nonfiction Fiction Literary Reflections Poetry Profiles & Reviews OpEd Blog E-zine About us Submissions Contact Shop Literary Mama Search Search this site: Literary Mama Privacy Policy Powered by Movable Type 3.16	About Us « Contributors, A-C \| Back to About Us \| Our Mission Statement » Who We Are Sarah Brownd, Reviews Editorial Assistant, is a copyeditor for The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. Her professional background is in technical editing and writing, although her first love (and undergrad major) is poetry writing. Sarah lives in Memphis, Tennessee, with her husband and toddler daughter Sophie. Melinda Copp, copyeditor in Fiction, is a writer and freelance editor who lives in Bluffton, South Carolina with her fiance and son. She is currently working on her MFA in creative nonfiction at Goucher College. Elrena Evans,("Birthing: A Process in Vignettes" and "The Journey Home") is the Marketing and Publicity Manager for Literary Mama and writes the column Me and My House. She holds an MFA from The Pennsylvania State University, and together with Literary Mama Senior Editor Caroline Grant is co-editor of Mama, PhD: Women Write about Motherhood and Academic Life (Rutgers University Press 2008). Her writing appears in the anthologies Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers (Random House 2006) and How to Fit a Car Seat on a Camel (Seal Press 2008), as well as in Brain, Child, Episcopal Life, Hip Mama, and Relief. She lives in Pennsylvania with her family, and blogs at her website. Vicki Forman, Reviews Editor, ("Dear Friend", and the archived column, "Special Needs Mama") teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart and has appeared in the Seneca Review and the Santa Monica Review, as well as the anthologies, Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child With Special Needs, This Day: Dairies From American Women, The Spirit of Pregnancy and Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined. She lives in Southern California with her husband and daughter. You can contact her at vickiforman(@)gmail.com or visit her blog. Caroline Grant (A Conversation with Gail Baker; Mama Sez: Literary Reflections), Senior Editor, writes the column Mama at the Movies for Literary Mama. She is also co-editor, with Elrena Evans, of the anthology Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life (Rutgers University Press, 2008). She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley, where she taught classes on film, women's studies, American literature, and writing; she has also taught at Stanford University and the San Francisco Art Institute. Her essays have been published in MotherVerse, HipMama, The Ultimate Christmas and A Cup of Comfort for New Mothers. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and two sons, a life she writes about on her blog, food for thought. Kate Haas, Creative Nonfiction Editor, is a writer and freelance editor. Before parenthood, she worked in editorial production at the New England Journal of Medicine, taught blind students in the Peace Corps in Morocco, and was a high school English teacher on both coasts. She writes about it all in Miranda, her zine about motherhood and other adventures. Kate's essays have been published in Brain, Child, The Mothers Movement Online, and Mamazine.com. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two sons. Joanne Catz Hartman ("Evolution of a Muse"), Profiles Editor, lives with her husband and daughter in northern California. She wrote the column "Mother Angst" for Literary Mama and was also a columnist for San Francisco's J . Her work appears in the anthologies Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined, Using Our Words, and The Knitter's Gift. Prior to motherhood, she worked for a New England public television station on an award-winning feature magazine show, was a reporter and photographer for a sailing magazine, an editor at a wire service, and spent a decade teaching middle school. Jenny Hobson, Profiles Copyeditor, lives, blogs, knits, and does GIS in an Ohio River town in West Virginia. She lives with her husband and preschooler daughter. Her blog can be found at Hobson's Choice. Sonya Huber (Dad, In Red, In Media Res), Creative Nonfiction Editor, is an assistant professor of creative writing at Georgia Southern University. Her first book of fiction and creative nonfiction, Opa Nobody (University of Nebraska Press, 2008), opens an imaginary conversation with her long-dead anti-Nazi German grandfather about the way to combine a private life with public responsibilities and political passions. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Literary Mama, Fourth Genre, Passages North, Kaleidoscope, and Hotel Amerika; in three anthologies from Seal Press; in Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined, in the anthology Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life (Rutgers University Press, 2008) and other anthologies; and in The Chronicle of Higher Education, In These Times, and Earth Island Journal. Sonya is a Midwesterner who lives with her husband and son, Ivan, in Statesboro, Georgia. More info at www.sonyahuber.com. Amy Hudock, Ph. D., Founding Co-Editor, teaches English at an independent college prep school in South Carolina, where she lives with her daughter. She is the co-editor of Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined (Seal Press 2006) and American Women Prose Writers, 1820-1870 (Gale 2001), and the author of scholarly essays on nineteenth-century American women writers. Her memoir writing about motherhood has appeared in the anthologies A Cup of Comfort for New Mothers, Mama PhD (2008), Cup of Comfort for Single Mothers (2008), Chicken Soup for the Soul: A Tribute to Mothers (2008), and Single State of the Union (2007). Her work has also appeared in periodical publications such as Skirt!, ePregnancy, Pregnancy and Baby, Philosophical Mother. She’s also published here at Literary Mama: Single Mom Fantasy, The River, A Journey to the Past, Down into the Mine, Father Writing: Floundering or Flourishing?, Happy Birthday to Literary Mama, Why Start a Pregnancy Journal?, and How to Publish a Book. You can read her LM interview and discussions about mothering in her archived column Mothering in the Ivory Tower, and at Single Mothering Southern Style. Merle Huerta, Literary Reflections Editorial Assistant, is an army chaplain’s wife, a religious Jew, and a mother of a blended family of thirteen; she has a Bachelors in Psychology from University of Pittsburgh, and a Masters in Instructional Media and Technology from Columbia University. During her husband’s first combat deployment to Iraq in 2003, she began co-writing articles about his experiences at the front. The series, “Notes from the Front,” published in the West Point PointerView, was to serve as an educational travelogue for military cadets at the U.S. Academy who were facing almost certain deployment after graduation. Some of their articles have been published in The Jerusalem Post, The Jewish Press, and National Review. Currently, she is studying non-fiction with New York editors at The Writers’ Institute, a specialized graduate-level writing program at CUNY. Much of her writing focuses on the human element, how we survive and emerge victorious after devastating life circumstances. Merle resides in West Point, New York, home to the U.S. Military Academy. Stephanie Hunt, Columns Editor, lives in Charleston, South Carolina, with her husband and three daughters. Stephanie is a contributing editor to Skirt Magazine, Charleston Magazine, and SOMA Review. A graduate of Duke University and Vanderbilt Divinity School, she specializes in personal essays and profiles, and has published Peeking Under My Skirt, an essay collection. Susan Ito, Creative Nonfiction Editor, lives in Oakland with her husband, two daughters and mother and writes the column Life in the Sandwich for Literary Mama. She teaches writing privately and at UC Berkeley Extension. She is the co-editor of A Ghost At Heart's Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption (North Atlantic Books). Her essays and fiction have appeared in Growing Up Asian American, Hip Mama, Making More Waves, the Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. She writes regularly in her weblog ReadingWritingLiving. Suzanne Kamata, Fiction Editor, lives with her Japanese husband and bi-cultural twins on the island of Shikoku in Japan. She is the author of a novel, Losing Kei, and editor of the anthologies, Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs and The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan. The author of numerous stories, essays, articles and reviews, her writing about motherhood appears in the anthologies It's a Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons, It's a Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters, Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined, and elsewhere. Rebecca Kaminsky, a Founding Editor and Reviews Editor, is a writer who lives in Berkeley, California, with her spouse and two sons. Her work has appeared in Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined (Seal Press, Jan. 2006), as well as the locally best-selling anthology Wednesday Writers: Ten Years of Writing Women's Lives. Rebecca writes the column Down Will Come Baby for Literary Mama, and she has been a guest blogger for The Washington Post. She holds a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies with a concentration in Women's Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center. Sarah Raleigh Kilts, Literary Reflections Editor, lives with her daughter and husband in the San Francisco Bay Area. A member of the Berkeley-based Motherlode Writers group, her work has been published in Common Ties and Literary Mama. She is currently working on her first novel which is heavily influenced by her French-Canadian-Irish-Catholic upbringing in rural Vermont. In her spare time, Sarah plays bass and sings with her husband, Tom, in their band, Diablo’s Dust. Sharon Kraus, Poetry Editor, is the author of two books of poetry, Generation (1997), and Strange Land (2002), and is still just finishing her third (revolving around motherhood). Recent poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Diagram, Slope, La Petite Zine, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and 6-year-old son. Shireen Advani Lee, Creative Nonfiction Copyeditor, lives in Singapore with her husband and daughter. Shireen is an attorney who practiced in-house corporate law in California before moving to Singapore in 2006. Shireen has been published in Singapore American Newspaper and One Magazine. Shireen maintains a blog, Beansprout Chronicle, about her adventures as an expatriate mom. Sybil Lockhart ("Grey"), Reviews Editor, is a compulsive journal-writer with a Ph.D. in cell and molecular biology. She has taught high school French and English, done research in developmental neurobiology, and taught neuroscience at U.C. Berkeley. Her recent essays can be found in Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined and Using Our Words: Moms and Dads on Raising Kids in the Modern Neighborhood, and her writing has also appeared in Brandeis University's Artemis Magazine, The Journal of Neuroscience, and The Journal of Neurobiology. One of her children's nature stories is forthcoming in Ladybug Magazine, and her essay "Naked" was chosen for a forthcoming Alzheimer's Anthology. Sybil is currently at work on her book, Early Stages: a Biologist's Tale of Mothering and Daughtering, a scientific memoir rooted in the stories told in her column, Mama in the Middle. Sybil lives in Berkeley, California with her husband and two daughters. Alissa McElreath ("Alice"), Columns Department Editor, teaches English at a small, private college in North Carolina, where she lives with her husband and two children (7 and almost 4). She chronicles her life as a mother, writer, and teacher on her blog. Starting in January of 2008 she'll be writing for the Family Education Network. Her essay, "That Mommy Thing," appears in Mama Ph.D. (Rutgers University Press, 2008). Amy S. Mercer ("Solitaire", "The Birth of Readers", "Not Alone" and Chronic Mama), Blog Editor, is a freelance writer who lives in Charleston, SC with her husband Dale and sons, Will and Miles. She writes creative nonfiction and short stories; her personal essays have been published in Skirt! Magazine, Byline Magazine, Diabetes Forecast and A Cup Of Comfort for Writers. She is a board member of the South Carolina Writer's Workshop, and works as an intern for Crazyhorse, the literary Magazine for The College of Charleston. Amy writes the blog Dreaming About Water, about growing up with diabetes. Kathy Moran ("A Kite in November"), Literary Reflections Editor, has two grown boys and three granddaughters. A retired secondary language arts teacher and literary magazine adviser, Kathy currently works as a teacher consultant for the Greater Kansas City Writing Project and editor of their newsletter Composing Ourselves. Kathy's reflections can be found at Marmee's Corner. Kristina Riggle ("What Kind of Mother") is a former newspaper reporter and mother to a preschool son and baby daughter. Her short fiction has also appeared in Espresso Fiction, Net Author's E2K, and the Cimarron Review. Her debut novel, Real Life and Liars, will be published by Avon Harper Collins in the summer of 2009. She is co-editor for fiction here at Literary Mama. She can be reached through her website, www.kristinariggle.net. Jessica DeVoe Riley, E-zine Editor, grew up in the South, and then moved to Southern California, where she lives and writes in the company of her husband and two children. Her short stories have won the South West Writers competition and placed in several others. She is published in Thema, has an essay forthcoming in Marginalia, and her blog posts have been featured in 5 Minutes for Parenting. You can contact her at her blog, All Rileyed Up. Lisa Moskowitz Sadikman, Profiles Editor, is a writer and editor living in Oakland, California with her husband and daughter. She holds a BA from Duke University and an MJ from the University of California at Berkeley. Her work has appeared in Salon, Attaché, Red Herring, Business 2.0 and PC World, as well as the Travelers’ Tales Greece and The Real Las Vegas: Life Beyond the Strip anthologies. Currently, she is working on a series of essays about a road trip she and her mom took back to the places of her mother’s childhood. Before becoming a parent, Lisa worked as a Content and User Interface Strategist at a now defunct Internet consulting firm. As a mother, she knows job security is no longer an issue. You can read about her journey into motherhood at her weblog. Maria Scala, Columns Editor (Vigil at Four Months), is a freelance writer and editor who lives in Toronto with her husband and daughter. Her poetry and non-fiction have appeared in Descant, PoetryReviews.ca, mamazine, Between O and V, among others. You can find Maria blogging on August Avenue. C. Delia Scarpitti, Columns Department Editor, is a freelance writer, poet and mother of three young children. Her poetry, fiction, essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in a variety of online and print publications, including Mothering Magazine, The We’Moon Anthology: Love, SageWoman Magazine, Literary Mama, Mamazine.com, Mom Writer’s Literary Magazine, The Apple Valley Review, and Natural Family Magazine, where she served as the Reviews Editor until the magazine’s hiatus. Delia lives with her family in a little white house with a tree swing in the front yard where she writes her novel, dreams of poetry, and maintains her website and blog. Irena Smith, Columns Department Editorial Assistant, emigrated from the former Soviet Union with her parents at the age of nine. In spite of her belief that she would never, not ever, learn to speak English, she has in fact done so, and holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA. She lives in Palo Alto, California, with her husband and three children, drives a minivan, works as a college consultant, and teaches literature and composition at Notre Dame de Namur University. She has published academic essays on Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov, and her essay, "Failure to Progress," will be appearing in Mama Ph.D. (Rutgers University Press, 2008). Christina Speed, Literary Reflections Assistant Editor, lives in Virgina Beach, Virginia, and is a married mother of two, uber-spirited boys under the age of 6. She has lived in cities abroad and in the US, teaching elementary school in some, and being a mom and homemaker in others. She has written a monthly parenting column in the Lahontan Valley News, has a blog at speedwrites.com, and is an aspiring author on two fronts: children's books and intercultural marriage. Nicole Stellon O’Donnell, Columns Editor, is a poet and essayist who lives in Fairbanks, Alaska with her husband and two daughters. Her poetry has appeared in various literary magazines, including Ice Floe, The Women’s Review of Books, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Prairie Schooner. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Anchorage Daily News and as commentaries for the Alaska Public Radio Network. With the support of a grant from the Rasmuson Foundation, she’s currently working on a book of persona poems about the life of Sarah Ellen Gibson, who in 1903 decided to start her life over in Fairbanks. Shari MacDonald Strong, Senior Editor, ("The Great, Death-Defying Father") writes the "Zen and the Art of Child Maintenance" column. Her essay, "On Wanting a Girl," appears in the anthology, It's a Girl, and she has been published in a number of publications, including Geez magazine. Shari worked as an editor and copywriter in the publishing industry for 15 years. She writes a blog from her home in Portland, Oregon, where she lives with her husband, photojournalist Craig Strong, and their children: grade-schooler Eugenia, born in Russia, and preschool sons Will and Mac, born via gestational surrogacy. Marie Walden, E-Zine Editor, lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado with her husband and six children. After a number of years as a stay-at-home mom and community volunteer, she returned to the workforce as a CPA and found that putting on panty hose and pumps was infinitely less enjoyable than wearing pajama pants and Uggs. She quit her job, turned her living room into a lovely workspace, and took up writing and other soul-nurturing arts with fervor. She currently blogs for Not My Tribe and Wanderlust and Lipstick and is writing a book on financial savvy for newlywed women. Sarah Weld ("An Interview with Rachel Sarah"), Profiles Editor, lives in Oakland, California with her husband and two children. She has worked as a daily reporter for The Oakland Tribune and the San Mateo County Times, in marketing for Publishers Group West, taught high school English, and edited the Neighborhood Parents Network newsletter. Her writing has also appeared in Using Our Words: Moms and Dads on Raising Kids in the Modern Neighborhood, The East Bay Monthly, and The Nob Hill Gazette.