A manuscript editor, writing coach and sailing instructor, Michelle Elvy leads an active online literary life as well, which includes Blue Five Notebook, where she is currently Fiction Editor, plus past projects 52|250 A Year of Flash and A Baker’s Dozen. A Pushcart nominee and 2012 recipient of the NZSA/ Auckland Museum Library Grant, Michelle has published her poetry, fiction, travel writing and creative nonfiction in numerous print and online magazines. She has also judged various writing competitions, most recently for Flash Fiction World and the South Island Writers’ Association. She teaches workshops on flash fiction, editing and grammar.

Michelle is the coordinator of New Zealand’s National Flash Fiction Day and has presented her latest flash fiction project – a collection of stories set across the historical landscape of Aotearoa – to audiences at the Auckland Museum Society and the SmartTalk series in Whangarei, as well as university audiences in Maryland and  the KGB literary series in New York. Michelle has been featured as Guest Poet in Auckland’s Poetry Live and rhythm & verse series and in 2013 she’s participating in the Spit.It.Out. spoken word festival and in a collaborative exhibit that features 17 visual artists and poets in NorthTec’s Geoff Wilson Gallery in Whangarei called “Reactor”. She is a member of the Tuesday Poem collective and the Northland poetry group Take Flight.

These days, if she’s not doing any of the above, Michelle can be found sailing on her 43’ sailboat that has been her home for nearly ten years. Slowing life to a 5-knot pace, Michelle embraces a less-is-more approach to just about everything. Flash suits.

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Sian Williams is a writer and editor. Her flash fiction has been short-listed for a number of competitions both in New Zealand and internationally, including the Flash 500 Competition (UK) and the Fish Publishing International Flash Fiction Competition. She was also short-listed for the Words with JAM First Page Competition 2012 (UK) and a runner-up in the NZ Woman’s Weekly Blogger Competition. Her story ‘Bomb‘ was featured by the Tuesday Poem group in June 2012.

In 2012, she was a coordinator of New Zealand’s first National Flash Fiction Day. Also together with Michelle, she offers workshops on flash fiction, self-editing and grammar.

Besides flash fiction, Sian also writes non-fiction and books for children. In 2012 she was runner-up in the Takahē Cultural Studies Competition with her essay ‘Abduction and Retribution, Persephone and Madeleine’. Her non-fiction has also been published in The Northland Age. Her writing for children is published by Learning Media Ltd as part of their ‘Ready to Read’ series. She is currently working on a young adult novel based on stories from Greek mythology.

Sian lives in the Bay of Islands, with her husband and two children, growing kiwifruit and big juicy oranges.