Take one part Appalachian redneck, one part wet dream, and one part filthy-minded wordsmith. Mix well and serve with chocolate-covered cherries. There you have the one and only Alessia Brio. In addition to serving as Coming Together's editor, Alessia writes all colors and flavors of erotica, from heterosexual to ménage to same sex, and from twisted to humorous to deeply touching. (Sometimes, usually by accident, it even qualifies as romance.) Her work has earned her critical acclaim in the form of an EPPIE for Best Erotica (fine flickering hungers) and a Romantic Times Top Pick (Coming Together: For the Cure) in addition to a plethora of glowing online reviews.

Ms. Brio lives in the mountains near Pittsburgh, where she masquerades as a soccer mom. Her fetishes include SuDoku, rare steak, and stainless steel. She stands 5'8" tall in her bare feet (which is how she prefers to stand) and has a mop of unruly dark hair that is being conquered by grey, complementing the laugh lines around her mischievous eyes.

The Internet is both her office and her playground, and she can be found online at alessiabrio.com in addition to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and a few other sites.

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Lisabet Sarai has been writing ever since she learned how to hold a pencil. She is the author of five erotic novels, including the BDSM classic Raw Silk, and two short story collections, Fire and Rough Caress, as well as many shorter works. Her stories have appeared in more than two dozen print collections edited by such erotica luminaries as M. Christian, Maxim Jakubowski, Mitzi Szereto, Rachel Kramer Bussel, Alison Tyler, and Alessia Brio (including four Coming Together anthologies).

Lisabet co-edited the ground-breaking anthology Sacred Exchange (Blue Moon Books, 2003), which explores the spiritual aspects of BDSM relationships, and edited Cream: The Best of the Erotica Readers and Writers Association (Running Press, 2006). She also works as a free-lance editor and reviews books and films for the Erotica Readers and Writers Association and Erotica Revealed.

Lisabet holds a PhD and two Masters degrees from prestigious universities that might well be embarrassed to acknowledge her erotic writing career.