PATTERNS AND TONES

Grier began ballet lessons at age five and left home at fourteen to study at the School of American Ballet in New York. She has performed on three out of seven continents with companies such as San Francisco Ballet, Miami City Ballet, and Pacific Northwest Ballet, totaling more than thirty years of experience as a dancer, teacher and performer. She writes and blogs about dance in the San Francisco Bay Area and has interviewed and photographed a diverse collection of dancers and performers including Clive Owen, Nicole Kidman, Glen Allen Sims and Jessica Sutta. She is the author of WISH, a ballet fiction novel for young adults. Links: website: http://www.griercooper.com Amazon Author page:   http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00LPUJWSK Barnes and Noble: www.barnesandnoble.com/c/grier-cooper Twitter:   http://twitter.com/griercooper Facebook:   http://www.facebook.com/griercooper LinkedIn:   http://www.linkedin.com/pub/grier-cooper/1a/63/357/ I...

Domenic Priore is the author of Riot on Sunset Strip: Rock 'n' Roll's Last Stand in Hollywood (revised edition out in September 2015), Pacific Ocean Park: The Rise and Fall of Los Angeles' Space Age Nautical Pleasure Pier (with Christopher Merritt), Beatsville (with Martin McIntosh), Pop Surf Culture: Music, Design, Film and Fashion From the Bohemian Surf Boom (with Brian Chidester) and Smile: The Story of Brian Wilson's Lost Masterpiece.  This fall will see the release of Priore's tenth book, a collaboration with '60s girl group and Shindig! singer Donna Loren on the Rare Bird Lit imprint.  He wrote the booklet notes for The Beach Boys: Smile Sessions box set (Capitol) as well as the DVD booklet for The Decline of Western Civilization Collection (Shout! Factory).  Priore was the primary writer for the two-part AMC documentary series Hollywood Rocks The Movies, hosted by Ringo Starr and David Bowie. Beyond the scope of these center-of-atte...

Karen Finlay (not to be mistaken with the “other” Karen Finley) has her MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College, and was the recipient of the Ardella Mills Scholarship and The Marion Boess Haworth Award.  Her work can be seen on karennfinlay.com , Muni Diaries, and Facebook status updates.  She has been honored to read her work at Litquake, Beast Crawl, Tilde, The Art Beat Foundation, Carried-Away Productions, The Mixing Bowl Reading Series, The Rebel Reading Series, and The Mission Creek Festival.  She is working on a Young Adult novel and a collection of personal essays about teen angst, a subject in which she is very well versed.  She likes pina coladas but hates getting caught in the rain. I stayed home and read a lot, and watched a lot of TV.   Holden Caulfield and James Dean became my idols—glorious misfits who didn’t worry about sweaters.   I wanted to hang out with them , not the stupid kids at my stupid school.   I couldn’t wa...

Frank Portman, a.k.a. Dr. Frank, is the singer/songwriter/frontman of the Bay Area punk rock band The Mr. T Experience and has written three novels, King Dork, Andromeda Klein, and King Dork Approximately. "I only mention it because I have this, a dream, really, that part of what it would mean is that the boyfriend is in this little club with the girlfriend where when one is hurt or troubled or being assailed by the cruelties of the world, the other decides not to be on the side of the world, but to join forces with the other member of the club against the world, even if it's frowned upon, even if it's a doomed scenario, even if the world's definitely gonna win.  Like you're allies.  The last remnant of your people.  A Sex Alliance Against Society.  But maybe I have it all wrong.  It does sound like a quaint, far-fetched idea, now that I've put it into words.  And also overly dramatic, if something can be o. and d. and q. at the same time...

Lynn Peril is the author of three books, most recently Swimming in the Steno Pool: A Retro Guide to Making it in the Office , a history of women office professionals. Her column, The Museum of Femoribilia , appears in Bust magazine, and she is a regular contributor to HiLobrow.com . Her writing has also appeared in London’s Guardian newspaper,  The New York Times , and on NPR’s “All Things Considered ." She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and three cats. From the moment she’s wrapped in a pink blanket, long past the traumatic birthday when she realizes her age is greater than her bust measurement, the human female is bombarded with advice on how to wield [her] feminine wiles. This advice ranges from rather vague proscriptions along the lines of “nice girls don’t chew gum/swear/wear pants/fill-in-the-blank,” to obsessively elaborate instructions for daily living. How many women’s lives, for example, were enriched by former Miss America Jacque Merc...