Meredith Escudier is a native Californian who has spent most of her adult life in France, a fact that has informed her writing in both palpable and intangible ways. She likes to write about the grand in the ordinary and the endearing in the unexpected, some of which takes place around the table. Her work (mostly essays and poetry) has appeared in anthologies, Steeped: in the World of Tea and the forthcoming Let Them Eat Crêpes, in food/lit journals, Alimentum www.alimentumjournal.com and www.culinate.com, in the International Herald Tribune and a political poetry site, www.newversenews.com. She also writes a monthly column on language for a bilingual magazine based in the south of France: www.blablablah.org.

Diana Blackwell is a self-taught artist in Berkeley. She works in many media, including charcoal, acrylics, papier-mache, collage, block printing, monoprinting, and digital photography. Her subjects include abstractions and imaginary scenes, as well as all the traditional foci of representation: human figures and portraits, still life, landscape, and religious, especially Christian, iconography.

Blackwell's colorful, happy-looking monoprints are a regular feature at Mignonne Décor in Berkeley. Her online gallery is www.zhibit.org/diana_blackwell/. She has shown work in California, Massachussetts, Missouri, and Nebraska. Her digital photography can be seen at www.flickr.com/diana_blackwell.

Blackwell has worked as an artists' model for nineteen years, including eight years as the staff model at Columbia College (Columbia, MO) and eleven years as a full-time member of the Bay Area Models Guild. Blackwell is also a Guild administrator and created the Guild's current website www.bayareamodelsguild.org.

She also created the world's only website about late British character actor James Booth see www.jamesbooth.org. Blackwell is a founding member of the dark electronic band Odor of Pears. She has published feature articles and reviews in Matter, Trouser Press, The Women's Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Vegetarian Times, The Animals' Agenda, and many others. She has a B.A. and an M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Missouri-Columbia.