Moira Russell, Reviewer, was born in Manhattan's French Hospital (and still absurdly but proudly considers herself an honorary New York City resident), and her parents moved to Arizona before she was a year old.  She grew up in Northern California (Burlingame, Walnut Creek, Berkley and San Francisco..).  She was educated many places, including Santa Fe Preparatory School, Interlochen Arts Academy, St. John's College (Annapolis), and the University of New Mexico, but didn't graduate from high school, instead earning a GED in 1988.   She received a B.A. in English from the University of Iowa (which, alas, did not see fit to take her into its Masters program) and an M.A.L.A. from St. John's College (Santa Fe), where she received the 1997 Henry Austin Poetry Prize and Scholarship.  She maintains she has never quite gotten over being given a manual typewriter at six, reading Dickens' Great Expectations at age nine and living in Italy for nine months at ten (who could escape a literary career after that?). Besides writing, she has worked as a student librarian, amateur editor, proofreader, copyeditor, website designer, and medical transcriptionist (she has been timed at 120 words/min).  Some of her current favorite authors are Isak Dinesen, Jean Rhys, Pauline Kael, Pamela Dean, Charlotte Bronte, Alice Munro, and A.S. Byatt.

Some of her early work was published in the Atlantean Press Review, and her poem "Icarus" was chosen for the premiere edition of Art Ideas as the cover illustration.  Although she didn't think she could write a short story in two sentences, she did for a lark and the result is at espressostories.com.