Rosaleen Bertolino was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and is currently living in Mexico. She received her B.A. from the University of California at Santa Cruz and her M.A. in English/Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Her awards include a Marin Arts Council Individual Artist Grant and an Honorable Mention for the James D. Phelan Award. She has twice been a finalist for Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Award, and has done writing residencies at the Writer's Colony at Dairy Hollow (2008, 2007, and 2006), the House of Literature, Paros, Greece (2018), the Hambidge Center (2023), and Monson Arts (2024). She is co-founder and host of the reading series Poetry & Prose Cafe, based in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and the winner of the 2019 Many Voices Project Prose competition. Her debut collection, "The Paper Demon and Other Stories," was released New Rivers Press in the fall of 2021 and was a handpicked book at Small Press Distribution.