Melissa Petro
is a journalist whose writing has been featured in The Washington Post, Allure, Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone, Good Housekeeping, The Guardian, InStyle, and many other national publications. She was a finalist for the PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize, and she holds a bachelor in Women’s Studies from Antioch and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from The New School. She lives with her husband and two young children in Upstate New York.

Lyn Slater, Ph.D.
is a writer, activist, social worker, former professor and serial reinventer. Throughout her 47-year career as a social worker she has creatively accessed performance, storytelling, photography, fashion, social media and the internet in the service of her advocacy work. In 2014, when she started a fashion blog at the age of 61, she instigated a change in how older persons were represented in the media as well as challenged stereotypes about what it means to be an older adult. At the height of her success, she walked away when her project became more about consumerism than culture change. She shares her experience in her memoir, How to Be Old. Today Lyn writes a Substack newsletter, How to Be Old, and a column in her local newspaper that seeks to engage residents of all ages in the project of making their city an age-friendly, inclusive and sustainable community.

Sari Botton‘s memoir in essays, And You May Find Yourself…Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo, was chosen by Poets & Writers magazine for the 2022 edition of its annual “5 Over 50” feature. An essay from it received notable mention in The Best American Essays 2023, edited by Vivian Gornick. For five years, she was the Essays Editor at Longreads. She edited the bestselling anthologies Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York and Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York. She publishes Oldster Magazine, Memoir Land, and Adventures in Journalism. She was the Writer in Residence in the creative writing department at SUNY New Paltz for Spring, 2023.MORE