Rachelle Cruz
Rachelle is from Hayward, California (in the Bay Area). She has taught creative writing, poetry and performance to young people in New York City, the Bay Area and Los Angeles. She hosts The Blood-Jet Writing Hour Radio Show on Blog Talk Radio. An Emerging Voices Fellow and a Kundiman Fellow, she is working towards her first collection of poems. Rachelle attends the University of California–Riverside, pursuing her MFA in poetry. Please check out her blog here.
Melissa Sipin
Melissa Sipin is from Carson, California (in Los Angeles county). Professionally, she is an production editor at Arcadia Publishing and is cofounder of TAYO Literary Magazine, leading its creative and marketing development. A VONA alum and graduate of the University of Southern California, she won second place in the Undergraduate Virginia Middleton Creative Writing Prize, and her work has been published or is forthcoming in Kweli Journal, Tidal Basin Review, and Lantern Review, among other publications. Melissa plans to pursue an M.F.A in fiction and is working towards her first collection of short stories. Her blog is found here.
