Shuah Khan
Shuah Khan was born Udaya Nayani in Ongole, India, the elder of two daughters to a veterinarian and homemaker. She moved to Colorado for graduate school where she met her future husband, who is also from India. After graduating from Colorado State University, she worked for Bell Labs, Hewlett Packard, and Samsung. Shuah is known globally for her significant contributions to the Linux kernel. She works for, and is the first female fellow at, the Linux Foundation, and leads the Linux Foundation Mentorship Program. Shuah's memoir about her childhood in India was released in September 2026, and her follow-up book -- about life in the U.S. and her career path to Linux -- will be released in summer 2027.
Learn more at ShuahKhan.com,
Wikipedia, and Grokipedia.
Elizabeth Paddock
Loretta Strharsky
Loretta Strharsky was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the oldest of five children. She taught school in Mississippi before moving to Washington, D.C., then California, and finally Colorado. She has been a poet since her teenage years. You can learn more about her activism work at 10001ways.com.
Ted Williams
Ted Williams was part of the Alpine Rescue Team as a teenager, participating in rescue efforts during the Big Thompson Flood in 1976 (Loveland man recalls teenage role in 1976 flood). After a long career in computer and software marketing, he retired to Loveland, Colorado.
Heather Hein
Heather Hein is a Rocky Mountain horror wordsmith who lives in Northern Colorado with a menagerie of people, pets, and plants. Her books include Gladys the Vampire and Devil May Care, with two more books and a colelction of short horror stories scheduled to be released in 2027.
Heather spent her school years in Iowa City, Iowa, where she worked at Hy-Vee Foods, edited her college paper, and taught writing. She is deeply committed to the local writing community and organizes various writing groups and events. She belongs to Writing Heights Writers Association, Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, Pike's Peak Writers, and the Horror Writers Association. You can find her at spooky events in the fall, celebrating fellow horror writers.
Katherine "Kit" West
Elizabeth Paddock grew up in the Kansas Flint Hills, studied French and journalism at Kansas State University, and earned a PhD in political science from the University of Kansas. She taught political science and writing at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri and now writes contemporary and historical fiction. She is the author of “Caritas,” a short story that appeared in Splendor: An Anthology of Love 2025, and lives in northern Colorado with her husband and their
two cats, Lily and Buddy Blue Eyes.
Alice Behrend
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Katherine West lives in the desert Southwest adjacent to the Gila National Forest. She has taught Creative Writing in Colorado, owned a bookstore in Mexico, and now a studio/gallery in Silver City, New Mexico. Her previous publications include the poetry collections Scimitar Dreams and The Bone Train. She has taught adult poetry workshops in the ghazal and haiku forms. These are her primary focus as a poet, as well as other Eastern forms such as haibun, tanka and rubaiyat. These forms fit her personal emphasis on the classical haiku tradition of The Essence of Non-
Separation. She is also a visual artist.
Alice Behrend was born Nancy Alice Judy on a farm in Illinois, the first of ten children. When she was eight the family migrated to northern Wisconsin, a move that she wrote about in Cutover Country. Alice was a prolific writer and artist who lived her entire adult life on Michigan's Upper Peninsula along Lake Michigan.