Cheryl Cheng was born and raised in Los Angeles, and is a graduate of UCLA, where she first began copyediting on the Daily Bruin. Since then, she has spent the past five years as copyeditor at Video Business, a trade magazine about the home entertainment industry. Besides finding grammatical and factual errors, Cheryl also is involved in music journalism, and has written and edited for such music Web sites as LA-based The Scenestar. She enjoys the Journalism Workshop at 826LA because the kids always impress her with their creativity and writing skills (and it's pretty fun putting together the 826LA Good Times newspaper). When not working at the copy desk, she loves to drink coffee, eat around San Gabriel Valley, and see live music. Her dream is to see The Smiths reunite someday.

Sariah Dorbin has toiled as an advertising copywriter for twenty-three years, but counts among her greatest achievements her recent mastery of fifth-grade math, and having fielded Cesar Guajardo's questions about Castro and puberty. A Venice native, she is the rare Angeleno who loves to walk places. Walking aimlessly remains a fairly constant interest; current obsessions include gray pit bulls, bike riding, Frank Rich's column, and loquats. Sariah holds an MFA in Writing & Literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and she currently is writing a novel. Her fiction has appeared in The Antioch Review and Best of the Bellevue Literary Review.

Lindsay Hollinger likes drawing, cupcakes, France, and the 826LA Workshops program. The Venice Wave is her favorite newspaper. She learns all sorts of interesting facts from The Wave, which is written by the most talented group of journalists around: the kids of 826LA West's Journalism Workshop.

When she's not busy reading the latest issue of The Venice Wave or dreaming of cupcakes in French (while drawing), Lindsay is gainfully employed as the Art Director for Punch Studio, a gift & stationery company in Culver City. She holds a BFA in Illustration from Syracuse University, which is ceremoniously kept in a plastic storage container in the back of her closet along with other Important Pieces of Paper.

She is glad to be a part of the extraordinary family of kids, staff, and volunteers that make up 826LA.

…then, one day, Mary Peterson opened the LA Times and read the shocking news: a drop-in tutoring/creative writing/storytelling laboratory and time travel mart suddenly appeared in her very own neighborhood! She had to find out why, and fast; it's a good thing (for her) she did.

Now Mary enjoys doing workshops and illustrating the kids' stories, like Tom and Camille's Weird Adventure. She gets a huge kick out of the wildly creative and insanely funny stories the kids come up with. Mary has learned a lot, too, like the word awesomeness, which is, well, awesome.

Mary is a children's picture book illustration/author. She lives in Silver Lake with her husband and a twenty-pound cat named Sumo. Her most recent book, Wiggle and Waggle, is about two wormy friends.