THE WRITERS
Lili Flanders is a graduate of the Juilliard School of Drama and earned her MFA in fiction from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in 2008. She spends most of the year in Los Angeles, where she tutors students who are dyslexic and writes. During the summer, she lives in Truro, MA. She’s married to actor Peter Mackenzie and they are the grateful and occasionally overwhelmed parents of five children and almost two grandchildren. Lili’s award-winning flash fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Wigleaf, Vestal Review, Foundling Review and The Healing Muse, among other journals, as well as the anthology Uncertain Promise, published by Compass Flower Press. Her poetry has appeared in Crosswinds Journal, as well as the Bellevue Literary Review.
Tommy Kim has an MFA in fiction from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and is finishing a novel set in the San Fernando Valley and Seoul whose protagonist is a Medieval Times enthusiast sporting a pageboy haircut. He lives in Reseda with his wife, two daughters, a cat, a tripod pitbull and three white cloud minnows. He teaches English at the local high school down the street championing wholly impractical lines of future studies for his students who are about to graduate. He has published a novel excerpt taking place in the Korean War in THE ST. PETERSBURG REVIEW, and on top of the novel he is finishing up, he has started another novel taking place in post-war Seoul from the point of view of a teenage fashion student itching to come to America.
Amanda Peppe graduated from London University of the Arts with an honor’s degree in Film and Television. Her thesis film was aired as a winner of BBC Showcase. She subsequently wrote and directed music videos and commercials for clients such as Panasonic, Clairol, Amblin Entertainment and Time Warner. After submitting three short screenplays to Channel 4, she was named one of the top ten new British writers by the London Times and invited to attend the PAL Writer’s Workshop funded by the heads of British film and TV. Her first screenplay, The Ladies Room, starred John Malkovich, Greta Scacchi and Lorraine Bracco. Amanda is currently finishing Walking the Underdog, a braided narrative of linked stories set in Los Angeles during the worst heat wave on record, where despite raging fires and rolling blackouts, love flourishes and change occurs in unexpected places for a group of misfits, immigrants and transplants in a city built on sand. She has an MFA in fiction from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Blake Reemtsma is a Southern California poet from Utah who has been a dishwasher, cook, ski instructor, snowboard coach, backcountry guide, missionary, bartender, and close-up magician. Blake’s poetry has been described as “emotionally apocalyptic.” (Martha Rhodes) His poems often go anywhere at the same time as they go somewhere very deliberate through “diasporatic energies that are very clearly structured.” (James Longenbach) He has published poems in Melancholy Hyperbole, Rabbit Catastrophe Review, and Beach Reads: Lost and Found. Blake is currently at work on The Desert Geography of Love City, his first book-length poetry collection. He currently writes and teaches in Orange County, Los Angeles. Blake is a recent graduate of The Bread Loaf School of English and has an MFA in poetry from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
