Sparked

Helena Echlin, a native of the UK, is the author of the novel Gone (Random House UK, 2002) and for five years wrote "Table Manners," an etiquette advice column for CHOW, the online food and drink magazine. She has also written on topics from belly-button reshaping to cardio strip tease for publications such as the Guardian, The Times, and The Sunday Telegraph in the UK, and Yoga Journal and The San Francisco Chronicle in the US. She lives in Berkeley, California and teaches fiction-writing online for Stanford.

Malena Watrous is the author of the novel If You Follow Me (Harper Perennial, 2010). She spent her adolescence in Oregon, which inspired the book?s setting. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and helped to found the Online Writers? Certificate, Stanford?s two-year online novel-writing program. She teaches fiction-writing for Stanford as well as working on her own fiction, and has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times. She lives in San Francisco.