Patrick Ryan was born and raised in New Orleans. He was formerly editor-in-chief of Fourteen Hills and assistant editor of Harrington Gay Men's Fiction Quarterly. His fiction has appeared in The Ontario Review, Best New American Voices 2001, Men on Men 2000: Best Gay Fiction for the New Millennium, Cairn, Velvet Mafia, The James White Review, Pleiades, Hanging Loose, and Rainbow Curve, among others. His first novel, The Resistant, is represented by Mitchell Waters at Curtis Brown, Limited.

Aaron Jason's work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Men on Men 7: Best New Gay Fiction, I Do/I Don't: Queers on Marriage, Blithe House Quarterly, Harrington Gay Men's Fiction Quarterly, Washington Square, and the 1999 prize issue of The Mississippi Review. Before coming to Lodestar Quarterly, he served as Fiction Editor at Doorknobs & BodyPaint and Tattoo Highway. He lives in San Francisco; teaches writing, literature, and Tolkien Studies at California State University Hayward; and is finishing both a collection of stories and a novel.

Frank Farm has been developing for the Web since 1996. A former Web developer of Adobe Systems, Inc. (the makers of Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe InDesign), he designed 3 of Adobe's Web databases and co-designed their community-building Web forums. He was the technical lead for the October 1999 redesign of the Support section of adobe.com, for which he received a special recognition award from Adobe Senior Vice President Jim Stephens. He is the author and editor of hundreds of technical documents for Adobe Technical Support. He is currently Webmaster of the School of Pharmacy at the University of California, San Francisco. Learn more about Frank.

San Francisco-based Performance Poet Daphne Gottlieb stitches together the ivory tower and the gutter just using her tongue. She is the author of Final Girl (Soft Skull Press, 2003), Why Things Burn (Soft Skull Press, 2001) and Pelt (Odd Girls Press, 1999). Final Girl is a finalist for the 16th Annual Lambda Literary Awards and the 2004 Publishing Triangle Awards and was named one of The Village Voice's Favorite Books of 2003. Final Girl is also excerpted in Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow, and received rave reviews from Publisher's Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Village Voice. Why Things Burn was the winner of a 2001 Firecracker Alternative Book Award (Special Recognition - Spoken Word) and was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for 2001.

Daphne Gottlieb edited poetry for Lodestar Quarterly issues 1 through 16.