Lesley Arimah was born in the U.K. and resided in various countries (including her native Nigeria) before moving to the States in her early teens. She spent a decade in the South before moving northwards to earn an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Minnesota State University, Mankato. A resident of Mankato, Lesley is currently working on her first novel.
Colleen Casey uses language and other arts to bring about positive transformation. As Morning Program Manager with the English Learning Center, in Minneapolis’s Phillips neighborhood, she leads a cadre of volunteer teachers to help adult immigrants build their voices in English and master other essential skills. She has worked with Adult Basic Education and ESL in the Twin Cities for over a decade and, before that, cut her teeth in community arts administration and arts in education with the History Theatre and In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater. She holds a BA in art history and is slowly completing an initial teacher license in English Language and Communication Arts. Colleen grew up in the Twin Cities area and is of European-American and Mdewakantan Dakota heritages. She is a member of the Loft-sponsored TGI Frybread.community writing group and was a mentee in the Loft’s Native Inroads writing mentorship in 2009.
John Lee Clark was born deaf and became blind in adolescence. His chapbook of poems is Suddenly Slow (Handtype Press, 2008) and he edited the anthology Deaf American Poetry (Gallaudet University Press, 2009). His poems have appeared in many publications, including The Hollins Critic, Poetry, and The Seneca Review. He is married to the deaf cartoonist Adrean Clark, and they run a small press, Clerc Scar, dedicated to the literature of the signing community. They live with their three sons in Maplewood.
Pallavi Sharma Dixit earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts, where she was awarded the Harvey Swados Prize in Fiction. In 2010, she was the recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant and a Travel and Study Grant from the Jerome Foundation, and in 2007 she was a recipient of the Loft’s Mentor Series Award. Most recently, her work has appeared in Fiction on a Stick: New Stories by Minnesota Writers and Her Mother’s Ashes 3: Stories from South Asian Women in Canada and the United States.
Jacqueline White Jacqueline White is a Minneapolis writer who has also worked as a waitress and as an activist striving to create respectful schools for all students, including those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. Her op-eds have been published in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and distributed through the Progressive Media Project. Other credits include stints as a senior editor at The Utne Reader and as editor of the Search Institute magazine Assets. She has taught writing at a jail, a drop-in center for homeless youth, and at the Loft Literary Center. She earned a BA in English cum laude from Yale and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Antioch University-Los Angeles. She is currently at work on a memoir, for which she received a 2008 Minnesota State Arts Board grant. Visit www.mytransgenderhusband.com.