Sheila Bender is an award-winning and widely published poet, author and writing facilitator. She founded Writing It Real in 2002 for those who write from personal experience, whatever the genre. A contributor to Writer’s Digest Magazine, she has written a dozen popular instructional books on writing from personal experience, including Creative Writing DeMystified, Writing Publishing Personal Essays, Second Edition, Writing Personal Poetry: Creating Poems from Life Experience, and Keeping a Journal You Love, among others. She has also written instructional prompts and writing tips for LifeJournal for Writers software (Chronicles Software). Her memoir, A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief, was published by Imago Press in September 2009. In 2012, Pixelita Press published her volume of poetry, Behind Us the Way Grows Wider.

Meg Files is the author of Meridian 144, a novel; Home Is the Hunter, a collection of stories; Write from Life, a book about using personal experience and taking risks in writing; The Love Hunter and Other Poems; and Galapagos Triptych: Three Ways of Seeing the Galapagos Islands. Her novel The Third Law of Motion was a finalist for the University of Michigan Press’s Michigan Literary Fiction Award. She edited Lasting: Poems on Aging. Her stories and poems have appeared in many publications, including Fiction, Writers’ Forum, Oxford Magazine, The Tampa Review, and Crazyhorse. Her awards include a Bread Loaf Fellowship. Her work has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, for the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award, and for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She was the James Thurber Writer-in-Residence at Ohio State University. She teaches creative writing and directs the Pima Writers’ Workshop in Tucson.

Jack Heffron has been a professional editor for more than twenty years, serving as editorial director for three publishers in that time. He currently is managing editor of Man of the House, an online magazine. He is the author of a number of books, including The Writer’s Idea Book, published in an expanded tenth-anniversary edition December 2011. He also was a founding editor of Story magazine, which twice won the National Magazine Award for Fiction. His own fiction has been published in numerous literary journals and twice was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His nonfiction has been included in Best American Travel Writing and has received awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and Authors. His column in Cincinnati magazine was selected as the best in Ohio in 2009. He teaches magazine and feature writing in the journalism program at the University of Cincinnati.