Erika Taketa (she/her or they/them) is a bookbinder from the San Francisco Bay Area. She started binding in 2022 and is interested in celebrating her favorite texts with creative and meaningful digital typesetting and design. She is mostly self-taught, but has taken several classes at the San Francisco Center for the Book and other locations. Recent classes include full parchment binding with Juliayn Coleman, leather skills with Beth Redmond, and bradel binding with Karen Hanmer. She enjoys experimenting with traditional and contemporary binding techniques and geometric structures, and is gradually working up to fine bindings. In 2025 her dragon scale binding was part of the Hand Bookbinders of California Member Exhibition’s Pride Flag Project. Erika also practices paper marbling, dyeing, and linocut printing, continually looking at new ways to incorporate different arts and media in bookbinding.

Cat Monroy (she/her) is a bookmaker and artist from Portland, Oregon. She has made a lot of fun things in the last few decades, but after creating her first lunch bag book at the age of 28, she was promptly hooked by bookmaking ever since. By day Cat’s “super-shero power” is teaching struggling readers the science of reading. By night and on weekends she is making something—books, jewelry, stickers, mixed-media creations…you name it, she has probably attempted it. She has made books for quite some time because “it’s always something that carries me away and lets me reside in a joyful space with my cat nearby, a cuppa tea, and maybe a Netflix funny on as I stitch, wrap, punch, and glue incredible papers together to make some fabulous structure.” Cat is looking forward to meeting everyone at the end of June, knowing that it will be an inspiring, creative get-together with talented instructors, staff, and participants. “You’ll leave happier than you came,” Cat notes.

Janet Boyko (she/her) is a photographic artist who is expanding her practice toward the intersection of image and object. Her work examines making, technology, and community. She earned her MFA in Photography from Hartford Art School in 2024, where her thesis project “User Interface” culminated in a handmade artist book edition exhibited nationally. That project marked a deliberate exploration of slow, hands-on engagement with her photographic material. After developing her book arts knowledge at the San Francisco Center for the Book and with the Bay Area Book Artists, she comes to FOBA to expand her community and advance her command of binding techniques, structure development, and mixed-media processes. She looks forward to bringing her skills in visual documentation and community facilitation to FOBA’s collaborative environment to contribute to the book arts community while clarifying the next steps in her evolving practice.

Castle Danz (he/him) grew up in his family’s bookstore, Zandbroz, in Fargo, North Dakota. There he developed a strong appreciation for books as communication vessels as well as aesthetic objects. He first encountered book arts while producing poetry zines for a club in high school. Ever since, he has focused on refining processes and expanding his knowledge of the craft. His education in book arts is entirely non-formal. He studies all the manuals he can find, like those of Arthur Johnson, Bernard C. Middleton, Joseph W. Zaehnsdorf, Edith Diehl, Douglas Cockerell, Keith A. Smith, and Hedi Kyle. Castle has printed and bound many tiny editions of poetry chapbooks; most are reprints of modern poets like Mina Loy, Angelina Weld Grimke, Louise Bogan, and others in the public domain. His community outreach includes presentations on bookbinding history and simple structures for self-publishing at neighborhood coffee shops. Employed at various used bookstores over the years, Castle finds opportunities to learn and practice conservation techniques.

Tess Yinger (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Eureka, California. In 2010 Tess received a BA in printmaking and book arts from Portland State University and has been making books ever since. Their one-of-a-kind artist books use found materials and text to explore intersecting concepts of memory, identity, and the constructs of self. Lockets, jewelry boxes, cosmetic compacts, and other feminine-coded items are repurposed into book casings that convey stories through a lens of gender and queerness. Tess’s work utilizes the structure of the book as a vessel and archive; personal narratives and found poems are carefully connected to structure and visual imagery for the purpose of connecting the viewer to a lived experience.