Judy DiGregorio was recently nominated by the Tennessee Arts Commission for inclusion in SouthernArtistry.com, an adjudicated online artist registry that spotlights outstanding artists who live and work in the South.  A published author of more than 100 columns, essays, and humorous poems, Judy’s work has appeared in The Writer, Army-Navy Times, New Millennium Writings, Literary Lunch, Migrants and Stowaways, Muscadine Lines: a Southern Anthology, The Church Musician, CC Motorcycle NewsMagazine, and other publications. She also writes regular columns for Eva Mag and Senior Living.

Judy is a YWCA Woman of Distinction in the Arts who has won numerous awards including first place for humorous nonfiction at the Tennessee Mountain Writers Conference, first place for humorous essay at the Virginia Highlands Festival, Abingdon, VA, and second place for a humorous one-act play at the Lost State Writers’ Conference. She is a frequent workshop presenter who has spoken at the Tennessee Mountain Writers Conference, the Appalachian Writers’ Association Conference, and the Alabama Writers Conclave. She will teach a noncredit course on humor writing for the University of Tennessee in 2007.

Categories: Nonfiction, The Writing Process, Humor, Publishing and Marketing Your Writing, K-12 School Programs (in Oak Ridge TN only).

E-mail: jdigregorio60@comcast.net

Kali Meister has worked for two decades as an actress, performer, and writer. Her most recent contribution to Knoxville theater community include five different productions of Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues and a multitude of benefit productions for local charities including Michael Karnes, T-Cells and Sympathy for AIDS Response Knoxville and Exonerated for Amnesty International.

She performed her play Exposed, a non-fiction journey through her life chronicling her survival through childhood incest, her rape in her early adulthood, and violence, struggles with food addiction, and negative body image for the Knoxville Writers Guild in March of 2006. Exposed won the 2006 Margaret Atley Woodruff Award for Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee. The play will be one of the featured plays for The Actors Co-op's Fringe Festival.

Kali was the recipient of the 2005 and 2006 Margaret Atley Woodruff Award for Creative Writing, the 2005 and 2006 Eleanor Burke Award for non-fiction, and received second place in the Bain-Swigget Award for form poetry in 2006. She has publications in The New Millennium Review, Pegasus Review, Prism, Knoxville Writers' Guild's Body Anthology: Low Explosions, Phoenix, and Circle Magazine.

Categories: Poetry, Non-fiction, Memoirs & Journaling, Humor, Songwriting & Performance Art, Playwriting, The Writing Process, and Writing as a Form of Recovery.

E-mail: meisterkali@gmail.com