Dr. Marika Lindholm founded ESME.com to ignite a social movement of solo moms. A trained sociologist, Lindholm taught courses on inequality, diversity, and gender at Northwestern University for over a decade. In addition to publishing numerous scholarly articles, she has been a regular contributor to Psychology Today, Working Mother, Mind Body Green, and Talk Space. She has published essays and fiction in the Daily News, Elephant Journal, The Hill, Ms., Silent Voices, and the Southern Indiana Review.

Cheryl Dumesnil’s books include two collection of poems, Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes and In Praise of Falling (winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and the Golden Crown Literary Society Prize for Poetry); a memoir, Love Song for Baby X: How I Stayed (Almost) Sane on the Rocky Road to Parenthood; and the anthology Dorothy Parker’s Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos, coedited with Kim Addonizio. Her stint as a solo mom ended in 2017 when she married her soul mate, Sarah, a.k.a. the Best Stepparent in the World.

Katherine Shonk is the author of Happy Now? a novel set in Chicago, and The Red Passport, a short-story collection set in Russia. Her writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Tin House, StoryQuarterly, the Georgia Review, the Moscow Times, the Chicago Tribune, Cicada, and elsewhere. Shonk lives in her hometown of Evanston, Illinois, and works as a freelance writer and editor.

Domenica Ruta is the author of the New York Times bestseller With or Without You, a memoir about growing up with a heroin-addicted solo mom. Her forthcoming book, The Last Day, a novel, was written in a postpartum fugue state as a new solo mom to her son. She lives in New York City.