I was born in the shadow of the World’s Largest Six-Pack (at the time, it was Old Style, now City Brewery lager). Raised a Wisconsinite (go Badgers, go Packers), I enjoyed an intrinsically fanciful, rural childhood across the Mississippi River in Minnesota. In third grade, I won the regional Reflections contest with my poem “That is What Sparks My Imagination.” In high school, one of my poems was chosen to be the title piece in the anthology “Dew Drops on Dragon Tails.” I worked briefly for the high school newspaper, but missed the freedom to tell fictional stories. In college, I felt that, “if I want to be a writer, I can’t possibly go to school for it!” Instead I published 12 issues of an underground literary zine, “Theatre of Cruelty.” I took some scriptwriting and playwriting courses and graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison with a degree in Communication Arts.

After a stream of random jobs, including Chinese restaurant waitress, antique store clerk, chinchilla caretaker and educational interpreter at an Australian-themed children’s farm, I was hired as a part-time Marketing Specialist for Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. Work currently consists of 40 hours a week as a Public Relations Coordinator for Mentor Graphics of Wilsonville, Oregon and countless hours of self-imposed duty to freelance work and the publication of my quarterly 'zine - Belle Lettre.

In my spare time, I enjoy reading, contemplating goats, tending gully camphor trees, sampling microbrews, making and breaking the prophecy of Telove, taking compromising pictures of cats, torturing young assassins, shape-changing, and thinking myself into a coma. Also working on a sci fi, and a trilogy of mystery novels staring a take-no-prisoners marketing rep that works at a zoo.

- Sarah Bartash