Andria Nacina Cole was raised in a house full of women and learned everything she knows about storytelling from their mouths. Degrees in creative writing from the universities of Morgan State and Johns Hopkins taught her to tame that homemade style, though she still calls on it every writing moment. She is the very recent recipient of the Maryland State Arts Council’s top grant prize for fiction, and has published work in Urbanite, Njozi Magazine, Penn Union and Shug among others. She has published a collection of poetry, Anthem: For Colored Women Only, and is working tirelessly to complete a short-story collection tentatively titled Clean Piles of Daughter. Born and educated in Glasgow, Scotland, Susan McCallum-Smith worked in the international fashion industry in Europe, Asia, and Canada, before becoming a freelance writer, editor, and book reviewer. She has studied many international literatures, including English, Russian, Polish, and American and attended both the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins writing program, McCallum-smith reads for the Baltimore Review and is the literary editor for Urbanite magazine in Baltimore. An addicted reader, she also runs an online book club (www.BookClan.com) which shares recommendations in fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and film. Susan Muaddi Darraj is Managing Editor of The Baltimore Review. She earned her Master's degree in English literature from Rutgers University-Camden. Her stories, articles, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, Al-Jadid, Mizna, New York Stories, Full Circle, Women and Language, Sojourner, Calyx, The Christian Science Monitor, and other forums. Her fiction and essays have also been anthologized in collections, including Colonize This: Young Women of Color on Feminism, Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century, and Anthology of Arab-American Fiction. Her collection of short stories, The Inheritance of Exile: Stories from South Philly, was a finalist in the 2003 AWP Awards Series in Fiction. She edited an essay collection entitled Scheherazade's Legacy: Arab and Arab-American Women on Writing, published by Praeger Publishers in August 2004. Her website is www.SusanMuaddiDarraj.com. Traci O’Dea’s poetry has appeared in Poetry, 32 Poems, Queen’s Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, and Room of One’s Own. She has taught poetry and fiction at Johns Hopkins University where she earned both an M.A. and M.F.A in writing. She is also an associate editor for Smartish Pace, a poetry journal. Next year, Traci will be living in France. Born in Bombay, Lalita Noronha came to the U.S.A on a Fulbright travel grant and earned her Ph.D. in Microbiology from St. Louis University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO. Prior to that she received a BS in Botany (Univ. of Baroda, India,) an M.S. in Genetics (Univ. of Bombay, India.) She is a widely published scientist. Her literary prose and poetry has been published in many literary journals—The Baltimore Sun, Catholic Review, Catholic Digest, The Christian Science Monitor, Crab Orchard Review, Passager, The Asian Pacific American Journal, and others. Her work has been included in the following anthologies: A Thousand Worlds: An anthology of Indian Women Writers, Great Writers, Great Stories ,from Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., Thy Mother’s Glass, Get Well Wishes and 2001: A Science Poetry Anthology. She is a recipient of the Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award for Fiction, 2002; and the winner of the Maryland Literary Arts Award for Short Story twice—in 1997, and in 2001 (Short Short Stories, The Best of Artscape, 2000.) Other honors include awards from National League of American Pen Women, Simi Valley, Baltimore Writer’s Alliance, Lite Circle, and others. She was accepted at BreadLoaf Writer’s Conference at Middlebury, where she worked with David Bradley, and the Ragdale Foundation Artist Colony in Lake Forest, Illinois. Her debut collection of short stories, Where Monsoons Cry, was published by Black Words Press in 2004. She is a science teacher at St. Paul’s School for Girls. Her website is www.lalitanoronha.com.

Flanked • P.O. Box 10899 Baltimore, MD 21234 • 443.433.6101 • info@flanked.org • website designed by eclectic