Dorothy Baird has been leading creative writing workshops in community and mental health settings for over 20 years. In January 2009 she set up the Young Edinburgh Writers, a writing group for teenagers. Her first poetry collection 'Leaving the Nest' was published by Two Ravens Press in 2007 and she is currently working on what she hopes will be her next collection. She lives in Edinburgh, has three teenage children and is also a Human Givens therapist.  Sally Baker lives in West Yorkshire. Her poems have appeared in various magazines including The North, Smiths Knoll and The Rialto. She recently received Arts Council funding for a residency on The Fielding Programme and for time off her day job as a gardener, to write. Her pamphlet The Sea and The Forest is forthcoming from The Poetry Business (Smith/Doorstop books). Caroline Brothers left Australia in quest of literature and adventure, doing a PhD in history at UCL before becoming a foreign correspondent in Europe and Latin America. She currently lives in France, where she has published essays on photography and articles on aerospace and migration. She has published a non-fiction book on war photography, writes short stories, and is now engaged in her first extended piece of fiction, encouraged particularly by a couple of Arvon workshops. Jo Colley is a writer and event organiser who lives in the NE. Originally a prose writer, she has published two poetry pamphlets : As If published by Vane Women, and Punchdrunk, a bilingual work published by Ek Zuban. In November 2007 she published her first full collection, Weeping For The Lovely Phantoms with Salt Publishing Ltd.  She has several parallel lives, some of which involve poetry. If she had her way, she’d live in a hut on the beach and make art out of detritus (nothing new there, then Colley). She can be found on the internet at www.jocolley.co.uk. Rowena Dunn has an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck College, University of London, and has had short stories published in The Mechanics’ Institute Review and Tell Tales 3.  She spent her teenage years in the West of Scotland before heading south.  She has been a corporate tax adviser for several multinational organisations and is now working on her first novel inspired by her experiences living in Moscow in the mid 1990s. Malene Engelund holds an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, University of London and writes in both Danish and English. Her poems have been published in Magma, Poetry Wales, anthologies Bedford Square 3 and Eternal Portraits and she is at present writing her first collection.  She has worked as a visiting lecturer in Creative Writing at Greenwich University and is currently co-editing an anthology of new poets due to be published in Spring 2010. She lives in London. Sarah Jackson recently completed a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at The University of Sussex and lectures in English and Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University. Her poetry is featured in the new Bloodaxe anthology, Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century, and her pamphlet, Milk (Pighog), was shortlisted for the inaugural Michael Marks Award in 2009. She is currently working on a series of poems inspired by submarines. Nina Robertson lives on the Norfolk Broads. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from London University. Her short stories have appeared in a number of anthologies and on the web. She has taught creative writing to teenagers and worked as a literary consultant. Matthew Branton (The House of Whacks, Coast) has described her writing as 'wonderfully accomplished...bold, sure-footed and very satisfying.' She is currently working on her first collection. Juliana Mensa was born in Wales to Ghanaian and Ugandan parents. She grew up in London and moved north to do a BA in English Literature at the University of York. She moved to North East England in 2004 to complete an MA in Gender, Culture and Development. Juliana currently works part time as an Arts Project Manager for Helix Arts and recently received a Research and Development grant from Arts Council England to support the development of her current creative project, a first novel.