Teena Apeles is a writer and editor with more than a decade of experience in print, broadcast and online media. She has contributed to several publications, including Audrey, BUST, Giant Robot, Helio, LA Weekly, make/shift, Pasadena Weekly and SOMA. Her work has also appeared in the anthologies Father Poems (Anvil, 2004), Bare Your Soul: The Thinking Girl’s Guide to Enlightenment (Seal Press, 2002) and Geography of Rage: Remembering the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 (Really Great Books, 2002). Apeles enjoys covering subcultures and unsung heroes, but she has also written extensively on art, television, film, interiors, lifestyles, music, literature, fashion and nightlife.

She is the author of the teen book Women Warriors: Adventures from History’s Greatest Female Fighters (Seal Press, 2004), which features women warriors of ancient mythology as well as modern women who grace today’s playing fields, screens, comic books and political arenas. The book is full of “straightforward facts made fun,” said KLIATT. And School Library Journal called it a “breezy compendium” that is “by far the most inclusive gathering of its sort.”

In 1999, Apeles and writer Andrea Richards founded Spin the Wheel Press. They published the unique collection The Deck of Chance, a deck of playing cards exploring accident, fortune, luck and the haphazard in daily life through poetry, short stories, commentary and artwork by 34 emerging writers and artists. Art on Paper magazine praised the deck, calling it “urban impressionism.”

More recently, Apeles served as the managing editor of the literary journal The Freshjive Propagandist, Number 2 (Freshjive, 2007), a project of the innovative Los Angeles clothing brand Freshjive that features some of the city’s most prominent writers and artists. She has also edited for public-television station KCET, book publisher TASCHEN, literary organization PEN Center USA, arts-and-culture magazine SOMA and the City of Lakewood.

Apeles is currently working on a graphic novel about illness and developing a new lifestyle publication for wanderers like herself. She is also looking forward to publishing another edition of The Deck of Chance in 2009 to celebrate its 10-year anniversary.