First There Is a Mountain

Elizabeth Kadetsky's memoir, First There Is a Mountain (2004, Little Brown), was set during a year as a Fulbright scholar in India. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New American Voices, the Pushcart Prizes, TriQuarterly, Gettysburg Review and elsewhere, while as an essayist and memoirist her work can be found in Antioch Review, Going Hungry—a forthcoming anthology from Vintage/Anchor—and many other venues. A short story recently won third place in the Glimmer Train family matters contest, and others have placed in the Atlantic Monthly student fiction competition and elsewhere. Her short story collection has been a finalist for AWP's Grace Paley competition, The Iowa prize, and the Flannery O'Connor award.

In Europe, she has been a fellow at Camargo Foundation, Chateau de la Napoule, the VCCA artists residency at Auvillar, France, the St. James Centre for Creativity in Malta and Fundación Valparaiso in Spain, and in the US at Djerassi Foundation, MacDowell Colony, the Edward Albee Foundation and elsewhere. In 2006 she was a teaching fellow at the Wesleyan Writers Conference as well as Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers Conference, and in 2005 Margaret Bridgman Scholar at Breadloaf. She has also been on faculty teaching creative nonfiction and narrative style in the creative writing program at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University's Journalism School.

Musical Chairs

Jen Knox is a literary exhibitionist.  She’s published mostly creative nonfiction and the occasional piece of fiction in journals including The Current, Flashquake, Kate, SLAB, Spring Street, Slow Trains, and Quiz & Quill, and she received honorable mention in the 2009 Glimmer Train “Fiction Open Contest.”  Jen lives to read good fiction.  Musical Chairs is Jen's first book. For more information, or to read an excerpt, please visit: musicalchairsbook.com

Katherine Gehan earned her MFA in fiction from Emerson College and her BA in English from Haverford College. She has played the flute at Carnegie Hall, lived in cities as varied as Vienna and Indianapolis (God help her), climbed mountains and raced in triathlons, given IQ tests to over 200 twins, and worked in higher educational publishing for nearly ten years. Currently she spends too much of her time blogging about how to balance writing with motherhood, among other things.

Jac Jemc's first novel, My Only Wife, will be published by Dzanc Books in 2012. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her fiction and poetry have been published in numerous journals including Caketrain, The Denver Quarterly, Zoland Poetry, Thieves Jargon, Bird Dog, Handsome, Sleepingfish and Circumference. Her chapbook, A Heaven Gone, is forthcoming from ml Press. Jac is poetry editor of decomP and recently guest-edited the seventh issue of Little White Poetry Journal. She enjoys selling books as well as embroidering monsters and the funny things they say.

M.K. Hall currently attends New York University's Creative Writing Program.  She earned her J.D. from Harvard Law School and her B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles.  Her work has appeared in American Literary Review.  In addition to writing, she enjoys Flaming Hot Cheetos, costume parties, and Dexter, her three-legged cat.  

Want Chyi fell in love with the written word when her older sister read her A Wrinkle in Time when she sick, doing all the voices. She received her MFA in fiction from Arizona State University, and has taught composition and creative writing in Indiana, Arizona, Illinois, and Singapore. In the spring of 2008, her students nominated her for a teaching award. They continue to send her philosophical musings, to which she eagerly replies. In the summer of 2008, she received an international teaching fellowship, and has been the international fiction editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review. She currently resides in Chicago, IL, where she mentors adolescents in professional and creative writing. She is at work on her first novel, and her favorite character from A Wrinkle in Time is still Charles Wallace.

Cheri Johnson was raised in Lake of the Woods County in northern Minnesota, and has since lived in Virginia, Texas, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Minneapolis. She studied English and writing at Augsburg College, Hollins University, and the University of Minnesota, and her fiction, poetry, and plays have been published in magazines such as Phantasmagoria, The Rio Grande Review, Glimmer Train Stories, New South, Cerise Press, The Emprise Review, and Puerto Del Sol. Her reviews on contemporary poets have been included in The Hollins Critic and Pleiades, and in summer 2009 her first chapbook of poems, entitled Fun & Games, was released by Finishing Line Press. 
In 2004-2005, Cheri was a Loft Mentor Series Fellow at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. She has won the Glimmer Train StoriesFiction Open, The Dorothy and Granville Hicks Residency in Literature at Yaddo, a 2005 Bush Artist Fellowship, and a 2007 Loft-McKnight Fellowship. In 2007-2008, she was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Currently she is working on a novel that retells the story of Rosemary’s Baby, as well as, in collaboration with the composer Aaron Gabriel, an opera about Heloise and Abelard. 

Steven Ramirez is originally from El Paso, Texas. He earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and his B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. He has studied fiction under the guidance of T.C. Boyle, Aimee Bender, Ethan Canin, and James McPherson, among others. Steven's fiction has recently appeared in the Blue Mesa Review, Stumble Magazine, and Midway Journal and he is the recipient of the Blue Mesa Review Short Fiction Award as well as the Iowa Writers' Workshop Prairie Lights-Jack Legget Short Fiction Award. Steven holds a Masters in Education and currently teaches at several colleges and universities across Chicago, where he resides with a very brilliant and patient lawyer named Michelle. Steven is working to finish his first collection of short stories and when he is not writing, he can be found holed up in his apartment, playing some very amateur, dorm-room style guitar. His favorite movie villain is Clubber Lang.

Jennifer Ruden was raised in Baltimore, Maryland. She received her MFA from University of Oregon in 2001. She now resides in Albuquerque.  She has published in EM Literary Magazine, Literary Mama, Puerto del Sol, Word Riot, Eclectica Magazine among others.  She writes a column for the local alternative magazine and, according to rumor, a poem of hers is plastered on a downtown bus.  When not taking care of her two kids, Jennifer is at her job, which involves teaching adults the reading skills they should have gleaned before imprisonment.  When she’s not doing that, she’s probably making a casserole.  If it’s pizza night (and it is quite often), she’s working on Leaving Utopia, her first novel, aimed at the Young Adult crowd.

Kseniya Melnik was born in the Russian Far East and immigrated to Alaska in '98, at the age of 15.  Since earning her B.A. from Colgate University, she has worked in independent film, classical music PR, pharmaceutical sales, real estate, the ER, and at a law firm.  In 2008-09 she served as a fiction reader at The Paris Review.  She is currently an MFA student in fiction at NYU and is at work on a collection of linked stories and a novel set in and out of her cold and mysterious hometown. She lives in Brooklyn by a park, a museum and a Laundromat, flies often to Los Angeles and Alaska, and dreams of the rest of the world.

Jessica Cheng graduated from the Ohio State University with a bachelor's in marketing, but has always had an affinity for all things creative and artistic. Practicing cello, traveling, making hand-made crafts, eating different foods, taking polaroid pictures, and enjoying nature's beauty are some of her favorite things to do.

Joseph Nalbone is from rural northeastern  Pennsylvania, where he grew up exploring  the little piece of the Appalacian mountains outside his family’s back door. He eventually went off to study computer science and psychology and worked at the local Knight-Ridder owned newspaper as a systems administrator. Remarkably, working closely with writers and editors left him with a good impression of the field.  He currently works as an Instructional Designer at Wilkes University. He earned his M.A. in Creative Writing from Wilkes with a collection of science fiction stories.  His MFA academic paper looked at how  the psychology of mindfulness provides a new perspective on a writer’s goal, specifically that state John Gardner described as the “vivid and continuous dream.” The internship here at Our Stories will complete his MFA.