Elizabeth Field Hogan, writer, editor and educator, began her career as Assistant to Rust Hills, Fiction Editor of "Esquire" Magazine. She was also Editor and Feature Writer at North American Alliance in New York City, and General Editor of "Inprint" a literary quarterly. She earned a graduate degree in English literature from Columbia University and served as Instructor of English and Creative Writing at Hosfstra University and Brooklyn College. In 1992 she was the recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities which culminated in a scholarly review, "The Norwegian-American Presence in Contemporary American Literature" published in the book "Nordic Expressions" by Greenwood Press. A subsequent Fellowship for Independent Study in the Humanities from the Council for Basic Education in Washington, D. C. took her to Reasearch Triangle Park in Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina for intensive scholarly focus on American literature.
Ruth Rubenstein Grill is a psychotherapist, whose first love was literature. She used to beg to be allowed to read "just five more minutes" when she was a child and it was way past bedtime. She recalls walks around her neighborhood, as a teen, always with some book under her arm: either Dickens, Balzac, Dostoievsky and many others. The first book she remembers reading was "La Maison Jaune," a translation of "Little Women." For a time she lived in Belgium during World War II and therefore takes pleasure in reading both in French and in English.
Natalie Safir has been publishing poems in literary journals since the 1980's and anthologized in college texts. She is the author of four collections of poetry: "Moving into Seasons," 1981, "To face the Inscription," 1987, "Made Visible" in 1998, and "A Clear Burning" in 2004. She has been poetry editor of "Gravida" and "Inprint" and ran The Pomegranate Series in Hastings-On-Hudson, NY. She has lectured on poetry and taught workshops in many institutions as a Gestalt Therapist and received a certification as an Empowerment Coach from International Empowerment Institute. She has developed and taught a unique program called Writing as Healing at the Hudson Valley Writers Center.