Mary Rose Betten  is a retired character actress, essayist, playwright and Pushcart prize nominee for her first book of poetry: Finding Your Best Angle, (Give This To An Actor)  Her chapbook, The Prodigal Son’s Mother, was selected book of the month for Finishing Line Press. She won Women’s Artistic Network’s 2010 Carol E. Doering Prize, and serves as reading coach on the faculty of "A Room Of Her Own” and will direct “The Pepper Lane Review,” poetry reading at Center Stage Theatre, Santa Barbara, April 27th. Her poem and essay appear in Wompo’s anthology: Letters To The World, Red Hen Press her first chapbook was Hanging Out With Loose Words, Foothills Publishing, New York and her interview with host David Starkey on TV’s The Creative Community, won first place nationally.

Candace Pearson is the author of Hour of Unfolding, which won the 2010 Liam Rector First Book Prize for Poetry from Briery Creek Press at Longwood University.  She is a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee and has had poems published in fine journals nationwide, including Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review, Comstock Review, 5AM, Poem/Memoir/Story and MARGIE. Her work appears in several anthologies, most recently Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose About Alzheimer’s Disease and Sharing the Seasons: A Book of Poems. Candace grew up in California’s Central Valley and now lives in the Los Angeles hills.