Beth Dooley is a writer and cooking teacher, author of five cookbooks and regular contributor to Fine Cooking Magazine, Kitchen Garden Magazine, Minnesota Monthly, the Star Tribune, City Pages, and The Splendid Table (Minnesota Public Radio). She is a contributing editor to Mpls/St. Paul magazine. Beth's books include New American Heartland Cooking, published by Williams Sonoma, 2001, and co-author with Lucia Watson of Savoring the Seasons of the Northern Heartland (Knopf, 1994). She teaches cooking at Cooks of Crocus Hill and The Chef's Gallery. She serves on the Board of the Trust for Public Land, Lake Country Land School, and is an advisor to the Farm and Youth Market Project.

Harriet Lerner, Ph.D. is one of our nation's most respected voices on the psychology of women and family relationships. For more than two decades, Lerner was a clinical psychologist at the Menninger Clinic, and a faculty member of the Karl Menninger School of Psychiatry. She currently has a private practice in Lawrence, KS. She is the author of many books including the New York Times' bestseller The Dance of Anger, Women in Therapy, and The Mother Dance: How Children Change Your Life. Her newest book is The Dance of Connection: How to Talk to Someone When You're Mad, Hurt, Scared, Frustrated, Insulted, Betrayed or Desperate. Lerner is a prolific scholar, a renowned lecturer here and abroad, consultant and psychotherapist. She has appeared on numerous national radio and television programs and her work has been featured in many national publications. Lerner and her husband live in Lawrence, KS and have two sons.

Kate Lynch is vacillating between bliss and utter boredom as a full time lay at home mom these days. Music and other creative bursts erupt when conditions allow. She is enjoying the awesomeness of her nine year old, who is a daily reminder that drooling, pooping, nursing, crying babies do in fact blossom forth as full on, self possessed creatures- eventually. Kate says: “MOMbo rocks and I need you on the radio again- hourly!”

Beth Friend is host of For Kids' Sake! Radio, a program for dialogue, for learning, for getting inspired to help kids. Raise the alarm about the dangers, spread the good news and share what works! With a Masters Degree in American history from Rutgers University, Beth brings to the table broad interest and deep experience reporting on cultural issues for both public radio and television. Experience as mom to Ari has brought the theoretical and the practical together in her reporting and commentary about children. Beth has been the host of several award-winning Twin Cities Public Television and Minnesota Public Radio programs. She received the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Radio Program Award (Best Live Local Talk Show) for Take-Out, a daily one-hour MPR program on American popular culture in the Twin Cities. For Arts on 2, she won the CPB Gold award for cultural programming and two Chicago/Midwest Emmys. Her work as interviewer on Portrait, Twin Cities Public Television's conversation program series also earned her a Chicago/Midwest Emmy.

Denise Mayotte (Bio is forthcoming, check back!)

An award-winning journalist for more than two decades, Michele Weldon writes regularly for the Chicago Tribune and her work has appeared in hundreds of major newspapers and national magazines. Her first book, I Closed My Eyes, has been translated into French, Spanish, and Dutch. In 2000, Weldon earned the International Women's Peacepower Media Award for nonfiction as well as the Individual Courage Award from Rainbow House in Chicago. Her work has appeared in two anthologies, Joyce Carol Oates: Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates in 1989 and Belly Laughs and Babies in 1997. Weldon has appeared as a guest on TV shows on NBC, ABC, and BBC as well as on several local network and national cable stations. She has been a featured guest on more than ninety radio stations across the country and in Canada. She is a lecturer at her alma mater, the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she has taught at the graduate and undergraduate levels since 1996. Weldon gives "Writing to Save Your Life" workshops in Chicago and around the country and is a frequent keynote speaker to local and national groups. Living in the Chicago area with her three sons, Weldon serves on the board of directors of Sarah's Inn, a domestic violence services agency in Oak Park, Illinois, and is a member of Children's Memorial Guild, a fund-raising arm of the medical center. She is a member of the Journalism and Women Symposium as well as the Association for Women Journalists.