Abel Posse
Abel Parentini Posse was born on 7 January 1934, in the Argentine city of Córdoba where he only lived the first two years of his life. Two years after birth the family moved to the capital city of Buenos Aires due to his father's work commitments. His mother, Elba Alicia Posse, belonged to the creole landed oligarchy of Galician descent who held vast sugar mill estates in the North West province of Tucuman. Amongst the influential members of the Posse clan in the 19th century, the liberal Julio Argentino Roca stands out, twice president of the republic from 1880 to 1886 and also 1898 to 1904 (3). Posse fictionalized 19th century Tucuman in his novel El inquietante día de la vida (2001), where two distant family relatives are the protagonists; his maternal great-grandfather, Felipe Segundo Posse, and Julio Victor Posse, patron of the arts in the sugar producing province until the 1940s.
Paul A. Toth
Born in 1964, Toth was raised in Flint, Michigan, a once-thriving "GM town" that was, by the time of Toth's elementary school years, beginning to disintegrate. Eventually, GM would provide less and less a basis for the city's existence, creating an economic void that has yet to be filled. Growing up in the Vietnam and Watergate era, Toth's earliest years involved bouts with the obsessional end of OCD as well as unexplainable depressions that intensified with age. These symptoms were often confused with bipolar disorder, leading to an array of approaches and solutions that inevitably failed. When college proved an intermittent and disappointing affair, Toth began traveling, eventually living in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Denver, and various locations in Florida. Through his late thirties and forties, Toth decided to complete his BA and then pursue an MA at Gonzaga University. Along the way, he found relief in the works of Jim Thompson, Samuel Beckett, J.G. Ballard, W.G. Sebald, William S. Burroughs, Henry Miller, and the Greek tragedians. His thinking has been influenced by the likes of George Bataille, Guy Debord, Henri Bergson, Montaigne, Marcel Duchamp, and many others. In addition, Toth’s “The Kind of Girl You Read About in New Wave Magazines” won an &NOW award in 2009 and was published in "The &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Writing". Toth also participated in the annual &NOW Festival of New Writing.