CoCo Harris, MFA, is a mother of three daughters and a native of Atlanta, GA. She has lived with her family in the Washington, D.C. metro area, Seattle, WA, the coast of Georgia, and now in the Susquehanna Valley in central PA. She attended Howard University for undergraduate studies in Electrical Engineering and graduate studies in African Studies. After receiving her BSEE from Howard, she became a patent law professional working for the United States Patent Office granting patents in laser surgery. After entering the United States National Patent Bar she began practice as a Patent Law Professional representing individuals, firms, and corporations, nationally and internationally.

On the other side of her life and brain, dubbing herself a lifetime diarist, she has taught the art and craft of creative journal writing since 1999. She has been a contributing writer and columnist for various magazines and has authored several creative journaling guidebooks for her writing and memoir projects. She was the host of the SOULTALK Journal Chat radio segment airing in the Nation’s Capital. Her book Resurrecting Proust: Unearthing Personal Narratives through Journaling was published in early 2011. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Writing in Fiction from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. 

CoCo Harris is constantly exploring the notion of how we tell the stories of our lives. www.CoCoHarris.net

Kalenda Eaton, PhD., loves the written word. Since she was a young child, Kalenda has viewed writing and the creative arts as the ultimate forms of expression. She grew up in Northern California in a household where poetry, songwriting, and performance were encouraged and often squeezed in between the responsibilities of daily life. After graduating from high school, she further enriched her life experiences by attending Dillard University in New Orleans, LA where she majored in English and Spanish, wrote a trunk full of poetry, and performed a few pieces with her more esteemed peers. Her studies took her to graduate school in Ohio, where she received a Master’s and Ph.D. in English with specializations in African American Literature. She has held faculty positions in the Midwest, South, and North with her most current position being that of professor of English/African American Literature at Arcadia University in metropolitan Philadelphia. She has published a scholarly text, Womanism, Literature, and the Transformation of the Black Community, 1965-1980 (Routledge, 2008), along with several shorter essays. Every now and then, Kalenda returns to her cultural roots through telling a story and pens a poem, memoiristic narrative, or piece of creative non-fiction. Daily, she extols the virtues of writers (known and unknown) who write without looking over their shoulders and has found peace and pleasure in her life’s work.