Jasmeen Bassi
Jasmeen Bassi, also known as Jassi, embodies Sikh teachings in her everyday life and in her writing. Jassi believes that poetry is like seva. Seva is the true essence of Sikhism —a Sikh does not believe in race, color, or caste because a Sikh believes that “God is one” thus to live a humble existence is to keep this message at the altar of your mind. To be a sevadaar is to believe in equality of all human beings, and to offer a helping hand to those in need. Jassi hopes that her poetry can serve as her seva in this lifetime, by inspiring others to cast-away the lines that separate them from their neighbors/strangers of different faiths, race, caste, and color. Jassi is a woman with a saaf dil, but she does not want to force the magnitude of her voice into belly because she has a reason to write. Jassi understands that as a daughter of immigrants, it is essential to tell the narratives of her people, and to stay rooted to her culture, religion, and motherland.
Chris Bollweg
Chris B. Bollweg is some dude from California's Beautiful San Fernando Valley that makes things up for fun and profit. He is everything your parents warned you about. Chris spends most of his time taking pictures of food he should be eating or drinking coffee in the dark, being stared at by his dog. He is the creator of The Lilim Chronicles series containing the serial novel, To Slice The Sky, and the short fiction collections Urban Legends of the Future and By Starlight-Before Dawn.
What drives me to create is mostly because I don't know how not to. Either it's a coping mechanism to deal with reality or just something genetic where I have to make a story out of my thoughts, experiences, dreams and fears. I also have a bad habit of taking things apart to see how they work, and fiction allows you to do that with fewer blood stains. This story sprung from my love of film noir, and as a deconstruction of the Femme Fatale trope/stock character in crime fiction. I also wanted to explore the notion of "one last job," and how someone walks away from the only life they've ever known. All of those elements found their way onto the page in some form.
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