Tobie Helene Shapiro is a composer and cellist who has also worked as a visual artist, cartoonist, graphologist, and professional chef. She was a columnist for the East Bay Phoenix Journal and has been published or is forthcoming in American Writer’s Review, Bluestem, Caveat Lector, Cobalt Review, DASH Literary Journal, Kaleidoscope: Exploring the Experience of Disability through Literature and the Fine Arts, Santa Fe Writers Project, Entropy, Songwriter Magazine, The Monthly, The Penmen Review, The Coachella Review, and in the anthology Fire in the Hills: A Collective Remembrance (1992). She has attended numerous writing conferences with The Opening and studied with Andy Couturier. She  was born in San Francisco and has lived in the Bay Area almost all of her life.