Reina Gossettlives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn and believes creativity & imagination are vital in movements for self determination. She is a trans activist & artist blogging at thespiritwas.tumblr.com. Reina’s writing has been featured in Barnard College’s The Scholar & Feminist Online, as well as Captive Genders: Trans Embodiement & The Prison Industrial Complex, Post Post Script Press and Randy Magazine. During the day (and often at night) she works at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project.
Dale Peck was born on Long Island in 1967, moved to Kansas when he was seven, then returned to the East Coast to attend college at Drew University. In 1993, he published his first novel, Martin and John, which the New York Times called “a brilliant debut.” Two more novels followed: The Law of Enclosures (1996), which was adapted into a feature film by John Greyson starring Sarah Polley and Diane Ladd, and Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye (1998). Five years later, Peck published a memoir-cum-novel, What We Lost(2003), which was, however, overshadowed by the attention bestowed on his book of literary criticism, Hatchet Jobs, and its most notorious review, that of Rick Moody’s The Black Veil. Since then, Peck has published two novels for children, Drift House (2005) and The Lost Cities (2007), one young adult novel, Sprout (2009), and a literary thriller, Body Surfing, (2009). The Garden of Lost and Found, which was to have been published in 2007 by Carrol and Graf before that company was bought and dissolved by Perseus Books, is currently on hold while Peck finishes the trilogy The Gate of Orpheus, which he is co-authoring with Tim Kring, the creator ofHeroes; the first book, Shift, is due out in September 2010. Peck lives in New York City with his boyfriend, Lou Peralta, where he teaches in the Graduate Writing Program of the New School.
Laurie Weeks has been a superstar in the New York downtown writing world since the 1990s. Her fiction and other writings have been published in The Baffler, Vice, Nest, Index, LA Weekly, and Semiotext(e)‘s The New Fuck You. A portion of this novel appeared recently in Dave Egger's The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and has been shortlisted for Publishing Triangle’s, Edmund White Debut fiction award. She has taught in writing programs at UC San Diego and the New School, and has toured the US with the girl-punk group Sister Spit. Her debut novel, Zipper Mouth, was published in 2011 by Feminist Press.
