President and Editor-in-Chief

Andrea Jo DeWerd is a senior majoring in English, with minors in Creative Writing and French.  She comes from the Land of 10,000 Lakes, otherwise known as Minnesota, and will hopefully someday work in publishing and prevent such travesties as O.J .Simpson writing a sequel and/or O.J.'s sequel actually being published.  She enjoys a good use of parallax, strong coffee and references to Fitzgerald or Dante.

Co-Vice Presidents

Nikki Baldauf is a senior English major.

Jackie Bianchini is a senior English and Creative Writing major.

Co-Editors

Caitlyn Chione

Brett Gall is a junior in the Columbian School majoring in Political Science with minors in English and Philosophy from St. Louis, MO.  Interests include guitar, water polo, and ski racing.  Favorite movie is either City of God or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  Favorite authors include Jonathan Safran Foer, Orson Scott Card, Stephen King, and Tad Williams.

Kristin Gudsnuk is a senior Fine Arts major at GW.

Tim Lawton is a senior English and Creative Writing major.

Crystal Maitland is a shamelessly eccentric bookworm who will read anything from cereal boxes to Shakespeare. She is a senior majoring in English with a minor in Creative Writing.  Her goals in life include getting an MA in English and finding her place as a writer. She enjoys drinking bubble tea, prancing at random, and belting fiercely to showtunes. Two of her favorite writers are J.K. Rowling and Haruki Murakami.

Lisa Peou is a 3rd year student at GWU.  She hails from Richmond, Virginia and enjoys  history, art museums, and live bands.  Her favorite book is Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.

Our Alumni

Lisa Francavilla is working at Oxford University Press in New York, where she spends her days commuting from upstate, eating bagels, and getting everyone else coffee.  Glamorous, right?

Shilpa Grover is from New Jersey. Like most GW students, she's a political junkie but occasionally indulges in her guilty pleasures of good literature and, yes, chick lit.  She is now a field organizer for the Hillary Clinton campaign out in Iowa. She's been there for about six months now, and still going strong.  Her hours are crazy and the days are long, but the work is very rewarding and she really loves what she's doing. Iowa is definitely a change from D.C., but hey, it's the superbowl of politics, right?

Jonathan Hakakian is currently on a quest to find the meaning of life (aka: procrastinating finding a real job...).  He may be found wandering the streets of NJ/NY/D.C.  If you run into him, wish him luck on his journey to avoid entering the real world.

Leland Tabares transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He served as an editor and vice president while with Mortar & Pestle at GW.

Aston Tebbe is in D.C. She worked in the HR Department and the Contracts and Grants Department at IFES for awhile and then moved to Crown Agents working in their HR Department and that takes up about 45 hours of her week. 

The rest of the staff is currently MIA.  If and when they are found, we will update you on their whereabouts and condition.

Rebecca Guyon and Karen Rosenthall are the founders of Mortar and Pestle. 

Rebecca is living in Oakland and getting her Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry at St. Mary's College. Before starting school, she worked as a staff reporter for a small weekly newspaper and did it part-time while in school. She just quit so she will have time to take on more TA positions.

Karen is living in NYC and working in international export sales and marketing for a publishing distributor, Publisher's Group West. She finished up  her Masters in Humanities and Social Thought at NYU, and is in the process of considering literature PhD. programs.

We can only hope that they're enjoying their post-Mortar lives and have not forgotten about us as they move on to bigger but not better things.

Asking a writer what he thinks about criticism is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.
-- John Osborne