Carma Peña has an educational background in theology, psychology and writing, and a professional background in both direct and managed care as a marriage and family therapist. In 2004, Peña graduated from Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma with a B.A. in Theology, and again in 2007 with an M.A. in Counseling. Between 2007 and 2010, she worked under supervision to become a licensed clinician. Prospects began to surface thereafter, most notably in the form of an offer to work in the field of managed care at Optum Health. Over the past five years with the company, she has transferred from Oklahoma to Texas, and finally to Georgia, where she maintains active and unrestricted licenses respectively as a Marriage and Family Therapist. While writing has always been a passion, and something for which she demonstrated natural proclivity, Peña is now honing her skills by pursuing another M.A. in Professional Writing through Kennesaw State University. Concurrently, she works as Graduate Research Assistant for the Graduate School of Nursing, providing editorial assistance to scholarly research and proposals by the faculty.
Julie Donn has loved reading for as long as she can remember. Only within the last few years, however, has she ventured to the other side as a writer and editor, initially through www.fanfiction.net. She is a graduate student at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia, in the field of professional writing, with the hope that it leads to opportunities in the book editing world. Donn has written three as-of-yet unpublished original short stories, along with one poem and a handful of fanfiction stories published on fanfiction.net under the pseudonym Scaehime. She has lost track of how many stories she has beta-read (fanfiction.net’s term for an editor/proofreader) in the three-plus years since she started.
Scott Volentine was born in Atlanta, Ga, and he received his B.A. in English from Berry College, in Rome, Georgia. He is currently pursuing his M.A. in Professional Writing at Kennesaw State University, in Kennesaw, Ga. He began writing as a child, writing his first novel at the age of fifteen, but it was just a hobby at that point. In college, writing became a more serious pursuit for him, and since then he has written three more novels. In addition to fiction, he has written memoir, poetry and stage-plays.
Sarah McGaughey graduated in 2011 with a B.S. in biology from the University of Georgia. At this university, she worked as a lab assistant, a job which provided her the opportunity to coauthor a published paper on plant physiology entitled “Ontogeny Strongly and Differentially Alters Leaf Economic and Other Key Traits in Three Diverse Helianthus Species.” A short time later, she enrolled in the M.A. in Professional Writing program at Kennesaw State University, where she works as a writing tutor. McGaughey’s passion is technical and scientific writing, though she also enjoys delving into creative writing, especially when it involves a little bit of science. She currently lives in Kennesaw, Georgia with her greyhound mix, Eddie; they enjoy hiking up Kennesaw Mountain together.
Staff Bios