Frank Gioia is a short story writer, actor and playwright. His recently published memoir, The Mercury Man: Remembering Brooklyn, is a collection of personal narratives about coming of age on the streets of Brooklyn in the 1950s, in a Brooklyn that no longer exists. He also introduces us to the year he served in Vietnam in the 1960s. His work has been published in the on-line magazine, Ovunque Siamo, as well as The Artful Mind and an Anthology of Veterans' Voices. A staged reading of his play, 14 Holy Martyrs, was performed in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 2016. He has read his work in the Berkshires, the Twin Cities, Sacramento and the Sierra Foothills.

Beverly Parayno was raised in East San José by immigrant parents from the Philippines. Her fiction, memoir, essays and author interviews appear in Narrative Magazine, Bellingham Review, The Rumpus, Warscapes, Huizache, and Southword: New Writing from Ireland. Her work has been translated into Mandarin and published by World Literature, a journal of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Parayno is the author of the debut story collection WILDFLOWERS (PAWA Press, 2023).