Aviva Dove-Viebahn grew up in a family of writers—her father a novelist and her mother a poet and playwright—and therefore decided early on that she would not be a writer. Instead, she entered into the world of academia, receiving a PhD in visual and cultural studies in 2010, and is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Arizona State University. And yet, she never escaped from her writerly roots; for the last ten years, she has been writing for Ms. Magazine in print and online and was recently named a contributing editor in charge of the publication’s scholar writing program. Other relevant experience includes her five years on the board of directors of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and her three years on the programming committee of the ImageOut LGBTQ film festival in Rochester, NY. Since deciding to pursue screenwriting with greater intention, Aviva has written several short screenplays and a teleplay; she also made it to the semi-final round of the 2011 NYC Midnight Short Screenplay Competition and was named a finalist in their 2015 Short Story Competition.
Brittany Fonte has always wanted to be a writer—since third grade when hand writing her short stories on fat-lined paper gave her hand cramps and lead tattoos. She received her MFA, with a focus in fiction writing, in 2007. She has published three books: a prose poetry collection about queer motherhood, a young adult novel focused on the dangers of online dating and the importance of being yourself, and an adult fiction novel on the ups and downs of long-term lesbian relationships. She was a finalist for the 2013 Lambda Literary Award for Poetry Anthology for a collaborative poetry and spoken word collection, Flicker and Spark, co-edited with Regie Cabico. She was also a finalist in OutWrite’s One-Page Play Competition in 2017. She teaches literature and writing more than full-time with seventh grade special education students, undergraduate composition students at the University of Maryland University College, and graduate students in the MFA in Creative Writing program at Concordia University, St. Paul.
