Liz Ellison is a Chicago-based playwright and screenwriter. Her screenplay Fault Zone won a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and her plays have been developed and produced in Chicago, New York, Omaha, Aspen, and Ypsilanti, MI. She has been a semifinalist for the Princess Grace Award and a two-time O'Neill National Playwrights Conference semifinalist. Her work appears in the Vintage Books anthology Shorter, Faster, Funnier. She is a member of Courier 12 Collective, Chicago Writers Bloc, and the Nest at Halcyon Theatre. Liz holds a B.A. in theater and English from Dartmouth College and an M.F.A. in dramatic writing from Carnegie Mellon University, where she was a recipient of the Steven Bochco Fellowship.

Amina Henry is a New York City-based playwright and arts activist. Recent produced works include The Paper Swan in the One-Act Play Festival at the Towne Street Theatre (Los Angeles, CA), the 2012 InspiraTo Festival (Toronto, Canada), and the One-Act Play Festival at Flathead Valley Community College (Kalispell, MT); The Bride at Midnight in Sticky at the Bowery Poetry Club (New York, NY) and My Beautiful Grandmother in the 2011 Estrogenius Festival at Manhattan Theatre Source (New York, New York). Her work has been developed by The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, HERO Theatre, The Cell, The Hive Theatre and Shakespeare's Sister Company. Her full-length play An American Family Takes A Lover will be produced by The Hive Theatre at the end of this year. She has a B.A. in English from Yale University and an M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University. She is currently an M.F.A. Playwriting candidate at Brooklyn College under the guidance of playwrights Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney.

Callie Kimball just graduated in the very first class of the new Playwriting M.F.A. at Hunter College, run by Tina Howe and Mark Bly. She has received a MacDowell Fellowship and a Ludwig Vogelstein grant, was a finalist for the Clubbed Thumb Biennial Award, and twice won the Rita & Burton Goldberg Prize at Hunter College. Her full-length plays have been produced, read, or developed at Washington Shakespeare Company, Project Y Theatre, the Kennedy Center, Electric Pear Productions, Lunar Energy Productions, and the Capital Fringe Festival. She founded the playwriting group Lizard Claw, and also the women's playmaking collective DC Dollies & The Rocket Bitch Revue.

"My plays frequently explore dark subjects such as parasitic relationships, emotional violence, and organized aggression. I like to set up collisions between characters who have run out of words and characters who have too many of them. I also enjoy writing plays that are adapted from or inspired by literary works—they're especially useful as a lens through which to examine topical and political issues."

Basil Kreimendahl is a 2nd year graduate student at the University of Iowa Playwright's Workshop. Her plays have been developed by New York Theatre Workshop, About Face Theatre, Wordbridge, and Inkwell. Her play Orange Julius was developed at the O'Neill Playwright's Conference 2012. Basil's play Sidewinders will be a part of Cutting Ball's Risk Is This… festival in 2013. She is the recipient of an Arts Meets Activism grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. She has taught playwriting to elementary, high school and college students in Florida, Kentucky, New York and Iowa. She organized and ran a playwrights group for queer youth in Louisville called Out On The Edge. Her short plays have twice been finalists for the Heideman Award. Basil's play The Cost of a Goat won the 2nd place National Science Award from KCACTF. Her work has been published by Dramatic Publishing and included in Xlibria's Becoming: Young Ideas on Gender and Identity.