Leah Baltus
Editor in Chief

Leah is a culture vulture and a clotheshorse. Raised in Detroit, she earned her B.A. in English from Northwestern University—after she ditched journalism school to become a poet. Leah once lived in Rome for a heartbeat and then made a foray into Hollywood’s literary world before she finally landed in Seattle five years ago. By day Leah is a writer, editor and project manager at Pyramid Communications and a blogger for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. When she’s not in front of a computer, she can often be found devouring cookies or waxing philosophical about contemporary gender roles. Leah resides on Seattle’s Capitol Hill with her exceedingly fluffy cat, Murphy.

Nick Katsilometes
Managing Editor

Nick Katsilometes is originally from Wyoming and after graduation came to Seattle to work in engineering. After burning out on engineering he said goodbye to the working world and went back to school to learn more about business. He loves to travel and lived briefly in Paris. Nick joined the RIVET staff in February 2007.

MichaelVincent Santos
Design Director

MikeyVi is a simple island boy from Guam, where he holds the village record for the longest breath held underwater (2 minutes, 1 second). Although he has fine-tuned his artistic skills in the Visual Communications Design program at the University of Washington specializing in Information Design and Cartography, his real passion involves drawing comic books and singing to the tiles of his shower. At the very rare occasion of catching this elusive genius, a recent interview with RIVET has divulged some tell-tale secrets from this designer/comic-artist wannabe: “I don’t think of myself as an artist. I make things that I find challenging = beautiful. Art is in the eye of the beholder, and since I only answer to one of my eyes, the other is ever critical of what it sees. I have no further comments at this time.”

Allie Manch
Art Director

Allie is originally from the Southwest, where she enjoyed panning for gold and walking around in the 100-degree heat. She studied photography at Arizona State University and then later at University of Washington, where she got her M.F.A. She currently resides in Seattle, where she works as RIVET’s art director to help her pass the time between taking photographs, listening to Bob Seger and teaching.

Leigh Simpson
Nuts & Bolts Editor

Coming from the culturally rich town of Lizella, Ga., Leigh’s friends are amazed she can speak the English language at all. After consuming her fill of hush puppies and Flannery O’Connor, Leigh moved north of the Mason-Dixon to attend Northwestern University, where she majored in theatre and fiction-writing and met some of the other kooky kids who work on RIVET. Currently employed as a teacher at the Pacific Science Center, Leigh looks forward to the day when art and a day job are one and the same.

Andrea Benvenuto
Senior Editor

Andrea is an East Coast girl living in Seattle, where her nights and weekends are devoted to drumming in hypothetical bands, obsessing over 1990s indie pop and reading whatever trashy materials she can get her hands on. Send Andrea your CDs, records, books, zines and other projects for review in RIVET.

Kathryn Lebo
Editor-at-Large

Kate Lebo was raised in southwest Washington by two Iowans and a bunch of vigilant daycare employees. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Cranky, Knock, Jeopardy, when it rains from the ground up, and the Seattle Public Library’s “Lines on a Spine” project. She’s the front desk & volunteer coordinator at Richard Hugo House, Seattle’s literary arts center, and she’s working on her first chapbook.

Jeremy Topping
Senior Editor

A product of the Flower (and Flour) City of Rochester, N.Y., Jeremy received a degree in history from Northwestern University. He now resides in the actual Northwest (sorry, Evanston, it’s not 1851 anymore) and would like to thank RIVET for the opportunity to uncover seemingly random minutiae. In his free time, he enjoys procrastinating, baseball and loving his beautiful wife.

Aaron Reed
Associate Art Director

Aaron Reed is a young chap hailing from Zimbabwe, Chicago, and New York. Having spent a little of his life in each location, he decided it was time to take Seattle on. Other than taking pictures of clouds and listening to Coldplay, Aaron heartily enjoys the novels of Proust and the work of Alan Delon. He is putting his NYU Gallatin degree to good use by doing a little bit of everything, but he is happiest when designing illustrations for RIVET and looking for smooth pebbles on the beach.

Tammy Vince Cruz
Associate Design Director

Hailing from lovely, but only sometimes stinky, Tacoma, Washington, Tammy is a self-proclaimed Japan-o-phile, is obsessed with pandas and dreams one day of being a Toy Designer. She graduated from Henry Cogswell College in 2006, with a degree in Digital Graphic Design, and is currently trying to climb past the bottom few rungs of the Graphic Design job ladder. Favorite pastimes include illustration, belting out 80s karaoke and avoiding small spherical things in large quantities. Her Pantone Color is 7514 C and CMYK Values are C=16 M=37 Y=43 K=0

Kay Neth
Associate Editor

Kay Neth joined RIVET’s staff in May 2004. She then spent a year and a half writing this “bio blurb.” To date, it is her most successful contribution to RIVET, although attentive readers will note that it fails as biography, in light of the fact that she wrote it herself. Kay apologizes for this oversight and other errors her bio blurb may contain.

Ryan Trager
Associate Editor

Ryan was born in Evanston, Ill., in the wintertime. He grew up in Michigan and now lives on Evanston Avenue in Seattle. He spends most of his time sleeping, taking the coffee or making sweet beats for the children.

Ali Marcus
Blog Editor

Ali works with the musicians. She also is a musician, and runs a record label to release her music into the world. She likes to argue about things, and she believes that blogs bring people happiness. She arrived in Seattle by way of New Mexico, Virginia and Paris, mainly because she has to be near the mountains—like the John Denver song.

Katie Gilliam
PR Manager

Katie’s roots stretch across the mountains to Spokane. She followed the bright lights to Tacoma to attend college and then followed the smell of beer to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After working at a homeless shelter and completing graduate school, she moved back to Seattle where she now works at an agency doing marketing and public relations for government agencies and nonprofits.

Andrew Sikes
Web Developer and Designer

Andrew is man made of wires, code and a lust for technology. Born in Florida, raised in Colorado and educated in Washington, his steady westward movement was cut short by oceans and sudden relocation to New York. And with whip like speed, or a year later, he moved back to Washington. His day job makes him an Information Designer. Outside of this molding, he fills sketchbooks with an assortment of madness while illustrating merchandise designs for friends and clients.

Trevor Leffler
Web Consultant

Trevor is from the East and West side of the Cascade Mountains in Washington State—politically speaking this makes him purple. When he is not busy developing Web sites, he enjoys singing, doing geneological research, playing video games, cooking and gardening.