Rick Bass is the author of 16 works of non-fiction, 4 novels, including his latest All of the Land to Hold Us, 5 collections of short stories, and 4 novellas. His fiction has received O. Henry Awards, numerous Pushcart Prizes, awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lyndhurst Foundation, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. He has had numerous stories anthologized in Best American Short Stories: The Year’s Best. The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons At Home in Montana, has been excerpted in O, The Oprah Magazine. His nonfiction has been anthologized in Best American Spiritual Writing, Best Spiritual Writing, and Best American Travel Writing, and Best American Science Writing. Various of his books have been named New York Times as well as Los Angeles Times Notable Books of the Year, and a New York Times Best Book of the Year. A collection of short fiction, The Hermit’s Story, was named a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, and another collection, The Lives of Rocks, was a finalist for the prestigious Story Prize, as well as a Best Book of the Year by the Rocky Mountain News. His most recent nonfiction book, Why I Came West, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives with his family in Missoula, MT
Deborah Bernhardt’s awards include fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing (Halls Fellowship), Wisconsin Arts Board, Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Hessen Literary Society, Germany. She received two residencies from the Fine Arts Work Center. Echolalia was published by Four Way Books as winner of the Intro Prize. Driftology won the New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM Chapbook Prize. Poems from Driftology are in American Letters & Commentary, Free Verse, New American Writing, The Offending Adam, Tikkun, Trickhouse, TYPO, Verse Daily, and Volt. Bernhardt’s poems have also appeared in Barrow Street, columbia poetry review, Court Green, Cue, Fence, Indiana Review, Quarterly West and, in translation, L. Der Literaturbote. https://sites.google.com/site/deborahbernhardt/
Miranda Beverly-Whittemore is the author of the New York Times bestseller Bittersweet (2014); Set Me Free (2007), which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best book of fiction written by a woman published in 2007; and The Effects of Light (2005). Winner of the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize and co-writer and co-producer of the short film Camera Obscura (an adaptation of The Effects of Light), she lives and writes in Brooklyn and Vermont. www.mirandabw.com.
Don Bredes has published five novels, Hard Feelings, Muldoon, and his Hector Bellevance literary suspense trilogy, Cold Comfort, The Fifth Season, and The Errand Boy. The American Library Association selected Hard Feelings as one of the Ten Best Books of the Year for Young Adults in 1977. It was also included in the New York Times list of notable books and was made into a feature length movie. Bredes’s new young adult novel, Polly and the One and Only World will be released in October, 2014. He lives in Northern Vermont. Visit Don at http://donbredes.com/
Jericho Brown is the recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland. Brown is an Assistant Professor at Emory University. His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including The American Poetry Review, The Believer, jubilat, Oxford American, Ploughshares, A Public Space, Tin House, and 100 Best African American Poems. His first book, Please, won the 2009 American Book Award. His latest is The New Testament. www.jerichobrown.com
Kenny Bruno and Beth Handman are the co-authors of the new series of books for children; Josie Goes Green, along with Antonio Bruno. Kenny has worked in the environmental movement for over 25 years, on issues ranging from toxic waste in local communities to international negotiations in the UN system. He is co-author of Greenwash: The Reality Behind Corporate Environmentalism, and EarthSummit.Biz: The Corporate Takeover of Sustainable Development. Beth has been a teacher, educational consultant, curriculum specialist, staff developer and administrator for over 30 years. At her current school, P.S. 321, she collaborates closely with Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University.
Leah Hager Cohen’s ten books include the nonfiction works, Glass Paper, Beans and I Don’t Know and the novels, No Book but the World and The Grief of Others which was longlisted for the Orange Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Among the honors her books have received are New York Times Notable Book (four times); American Library Association Ten Best Books of the Year and The Toronto Globe and Mail Ten Best Books of the Year. A frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review, she also writes the blog, Love as a Found Object. She serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence at The College of the Holy Cross and is also on the faculty of Lesley University’s MFA in Creative Writing. www.leahhagercohen.com
Cynthia Cruz is the author of Ruin, a collection of poems published in 2006 and The Glimmering Room, published in 2012 plus a new collection, Wunderkammer. forthcoming from Four Way Books in October. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Field, and others. Her work has been anthologized in “Isn’t it Romantic: 100 Poems by Younger American Poets” and “The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries.” She has received fellowships from Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony, and she was the 2010-2011 Hodder Fellow in Poetry at Princeton University. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
Andre Dubus III is the author of six books, including the New York Times’ bestsellers House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and his memoir, Townie. His most recent book, Dirty Love, published in the fall of 2013, was a New York Times “Notable Book” selection, a New York Times “Editors’ Choice,” a 2013 “Notable Fiction” choice from The Washington Post, and a Kirkus “Starred Best Book of 2013”. Dubus has been a finalist for the National Book Award, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, and is a 2012 recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books are published in over 25 languages, and he teaches full-time at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Fontaine, a modern dancer, and their three children. www.andredubus.com
Ophira Eisenberg is the host of NPR’s Ask Me Another. A familiar face in the comedy world, Eisenberg moved to New York in 2001 from Canada and performs stand-up regularly at comedy clubs in the city as well as headlining across the United States, Canada and Europe. She tours as a host and storyteller with The Moth and is featured on The Moth Radio Hour and podcast. Selected as one of New York Magazine’s “Top 10 Comics that Funny People Find Funny,” and featured in the New York Times as a skilled comedian and storyteller with a “bleakly stylish” sense of humor, Ophira has appeared on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, Comedy Central, The Today Show, VH-1 and more. Her memoir, Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy, was recently optioned by Zucker Productions. www.OphiraEisenberg.com
Joseph J. Ellis is the author of eight books. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Founding Brothers: the Revolutionary Generation and won the 1997 National Book Award for American Sphinx, a biography of Thomas Jefferson. His chronicle of the life of our first president, His Excellency: George Washington, was a New York Times bestseller. Ellis’ newest book, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence was released in 2013. Ellis’s commentaries have been featured on CBS, C-SPAN, CNN, and the PBS’s The News Hour, and he has appeared in several PBS documentaries on early America. Ellis currently teaches at the Commonwealth Honors College at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He previously taught at Mount Holyoke College and at the United States Military Academy at West Point. www.josephellishistorian.com
Tim Federle grew up in San Francisco and Pittsburgh before moving to New York to dance on Broadway, where he appeared in the original casts of The Little Mermaid and Gypsy before coaching the child stars of Billy Elliot. Tim’s debut novel for kids, Better Nate Than Ever — described as “Judy Blume as seen through a Stephen Sondheim lens” by Huffington Post — was named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2013, a Slate.com Favorite Book of the Year, and a Best Book of the Year by both Amazon and Publishers Weekly. The sequel, Five, Six, Seven, Nate!, follows Nate Foster’s further adventures onstage and off. It was named a Best Book of January 2014 by Amazon, received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus, and is available now. Tim is also the author of the literary cocktail guide Tequila Mockingbird, which was voted the #1 Cookbook of 2013 on Goodreads and his new book Hickory, Daiquiri, Dock. http://timfederle.com/
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Julia Fierro is the founder of the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, a creative home to more than 2500 writers since 2002. Her novel, Cutting Teeth, was included in Library Journal‘s “Spring 2014 Best Debuts” and on “Most Anticipated Books of 2014″ lists by HuffPost Books, The Millions, Flavorwire, Brooklyn Magazine and Marie Claire. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow, she’s written for Guernica, Glamour, and other publications, and has been profiled in The L Magazine, The Observer, and The Economist. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their two children. www.juliafierro.com
Jeff Friedman’s sixth collection of poetry, Pretenders, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2014. His poems, mini stories and translations have appeared in many literary magazines, including American Poetry Review, Poetry, New England Review, Poetry International, Quick Fiction, Antioch Review, Agni Online, 100-Word Story, Sentence, Vestal Review, Plume, and The New Republic. His poems recently appeared in the anthology The New Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish Poets, and one of his flash stories was published in the anthology Flash Fiction Funny. His and Dzvinia Orlowsky’s translation of Polish poet Mieczyslaw Jastrun’s Memorials was published by Lavender Ink/Dialogos in 2014. Friedman has won two individual artist grants from the New Hampshire State Arts Council, The Carnegie Mellon University Press Open Competition, The Editor’s Prize from The Missouri Review and the Milton Dorfman Poetry Prize. He has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts the Vermont Studio Center and Yaddo. Since 1994, he has taught at Keene State College, where he and poet William Doreski cofounded the Keene State Writers’ Conference. www.poetjefffriedman.com.
K.L. Going is the award-winning author of books for children and teens. Her first novel, Fat Kid Rules the World was a Michael L. Printz Honor Book, listed with YALSA’s Best Books for Young Adults and their Best Books for the Past Decade. Her books have been Booksense picks, Scholastic Book Club choices, Junior Library Guild selections, NY Public Library Best Books for the Teenage, and winners of state book awards. The movie of Fat Kid Rules the World was released in 2012. www.klgoing.com.
Thomas Christopher Greene The Headmaster’s Wife is Tom’s fourth novel. His previous books are Mirror Lake, I’ll Never Be Long Gone and Envious Moon. His fiction has been translated into 11 languages and his writing has been nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Greene’s first novel was named one of the thirty books to be rediscovered by Waterstone’s in the UK, alongside authors Kurt Vonnegut, Jose Saramango, Alice Hoffmann and others. In 2006, Tom founded the Vermont College of Fine Arts, making him the youngest college president in America at that time. In the five years since its inception, Tom has led Vermont College of Fine Arts on a mission to become a national center for education in the arts. Its writing programs enjoy top national rankings and he has started new programs in graphic design, music composition and film. www.thomaschristophergreene.com.
Barbara Hamby was born in New Orleans and raised in Hawai’i. She is the author of five books of poems, most recently On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems, Babel and All-Night Lingo Tango. She was a 2010 Guggenheim fellow in Poetry and her book of short stories, Lester Higata’s 20th Century, won the 2010 Iowa Short Fiction Award. Hamby received a fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1996. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2000, 2009, and 2010 and the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2001. She teaches creative writing at Florida State University where she is Distinguished University Scholar. www.barbarahamby.com
Eleanor Henderson was born in Greece, grew up in Florida, and attended Middlebury College and the University of Virginia, where she received her MFA. The New York Times named her debut novel, Ten Thousand Saints, one of the Top 10 Books of 2011. The book was also a finalist for the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction from The Los Angeles Times. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, All Things Considered, and Poets & Writers. An assistant professor at Ithaca College, she lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband and sons. She is also co-editor of Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers. www.eleanorhenderson.net/about-the-author.
Margaret A. Hogan is the former managing editor of the Adams Papers editorial project at the Massachusetts Historical Society. She was the lead editor for volumes 7–11 of the Adams Family Correspondence series, and with her colleague C. James Taylor, co-edited My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams and a new book, A Traveled First Lady, the diary of Louisa Catherine Adams. Before that she held editorial positions with the Ratification of the Constitution documentary editing project, Oxford University Press, and the Greenwood Publishing Group. She trained in history at Swarthmore College and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, specializing in American religious and women’s history.
Ann Hood is the author of the bestselling novels The Red Thread, The Knitting Circle and Somewhere Off The Coast Of Maine. Her memoir, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, in which she shares her personal story of losing her five year old daughter Grace in 2002, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and named one of the top 10 non-fiction books of 2008. Her essays and short stories have appeared in Good Housekeeping, The New York Times, Ladies Home Journal, More, Tin House, Ploughshares, and The Paris Review. Ann has won a Best American Spiritual Writing Award, the Paul Bowles Prize for Short Fiction, and two Pushcart Prizes. Her new novel, An Italian Wife, will be published in September. www.AnnHood.us
Tim Horvath is the author of Understories, published by Bellevue Literary Press (2012), which won the New Hampshire Literary Award for Outstanding Fiction, and was praised by Nancy Pearl on KUOW’s The Record. His story Circulation was published separately as a novella by sunnyoutside press. His story “The Conversations” was a Special Mention in the 2014 Pushcart Anthology. He teaches Creative Writing in the BFA and MFA programs at the New Hampshire Institute of Art, as well as at Grub Street. His stories have been published in Conjunctions, Fiction, Puerto del Sol, The Normal School, and many other journals. “The Understory” won the Raymond Carver Short Story Prize, judged by Bill Henderson, and he’s been the recipient of a Yaddo Fellowship. His website is http://www.timhorvath.com/. Currently he’s at work on a novel called The Spinal Descent.
Leslie Jamison is the author of The New York Times bestselling collection of essays, The Empathy Exams and the novel, The Gin Closet, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, Oxford American, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, and the New York Times, where she is a regular columnist for the Sunday Book Review. She went to Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently finishing a doctoral dissertation at Yale about addiction narratives. www.lesliejamison.com
Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of the novel Remember Me Like This, which is a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and the award-winning Corpus Christi: Stories, which was named a Best Book of the Year by The Independent (London) and The Irish Times. His awards include the Pushcart Prize, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, the Stephen Turner Award, the Cohen Prize, a James Michener Fellowship, and the Kay Cattarulla Prize for short fiction. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he’s the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and a 5 Under 35 honor from the National Book Foundation. He teaches in the Bennington Writing Seminars and at Harvard University, where he is the Director of Creative Writing. www.bretanthonyjohnston.com
Alden Jones has lived, worked, and traveled in over forty countries, including as a WorldTeach volunteer in Costa Rica, a program director in Cuba, and a professor on Semester at Sea. Her story collection, Unaccompanied Minors, won the 2013 New American Fiction Prize. Her first book, The Blind Masseuse: A Traveler’s Memoir from Costa Rica to Cambodia was named Best Travel Book of 2013 by The Huffington Post , was listed as one of the Top Ten Travel Book of the Season by Publishers Weekly and was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. A graduate of Brown University, the New York University Creative Writing Program, and the Bennington Writing Seminars, Alden teaches creative writing and cultural studies at Emerson College in Boston. www.aldenjones.com
Fred Kaplan is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of numerous biographies, most recently, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary and Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer. His other biographies include The Singular Mark Twain, Gore Vidal: A Biography, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, A Biography, and Dickens: A Biography, His book, Thomas Carlyle: A Biography, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Boothbay, Maine.
Phil Klay is a graduate of Dartmouth College and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. He served in Iraq’s Anbar Province from January 2007 to February 2008 as a Public Affairs Officer. After being discharged he went to Hunter College and received an MFA. His story, Redeployment, was originally published in Granta and is included in Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. The New Yorker called his new book of stories, Redeployment, “The best literary work thus far written by a veteran of America’s recent wars…” His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, Tin House, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012. www.philklay.com
Jean Hanff Korelitz is the author of the novels, You Should Have Known, Admission, The White Rose, The Sabbathday River and A Jury of Her Peers. She has also written a novel for children, Interference Powder, and a collection of poetry, The Properties of Breath. Her non-fiction has appeared in various anthologies and in publications such as Vogue, Real Simple, Reader’s Digest and The New York Times. Born and raised in New York City and educated at Dartmouth College and Clare College, Cambridge, she lives in New York City with her husband, Irish poet Paul Muldoon, and their children. She is the founder of bookthewriter.com, a New York City based service that connects authors and book groups. www.JeanHanffKorelitz.com
Tara Laskowski is the author of Modern Manners For Your Inner Demons . She is also senior editor at the online flash fiction literary magazine SmokeLong Quarterly, and was their 2009 Kathy Fish Fellow and writer-in-residence. She earned a BA in English with a minor in writing from Susquehanna University and an MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University. Her submission of short fiction won the 2010 literary awards series from the Santa Fe Writers Project. She lives in a suburb of Washington, D.C., with her husband Art Taylor, her son Dashiell, and their two cats. www.taralaskowski.com
Ronald Levao, coeditor with Susan Wolfson of The Annotated Frankenstein is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University New Brunswick where he received the university’s highest teaching award, the Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching, for 2004. A specialist in Renaissance literature, he is the author of Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions, and of several essays–on Shakespeare, Christopher Marlow, Frances Bacon, Milton’s Paradise Lost–as well as the editor of the Longman Cultural Edition of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Parts I and II, and Selected Poems of Thomas Campion, Samuel Daniel, and Walter Ralegh.
Lesle Lewis’ collections include A Boot’s a Boot, lie down too, Small Boat (winner of the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize) and Landscapes I & II. Her chapbook, It’s Rothko in Winter or Belgium was published in 2012. She has had poems in American Letters and Commentary, Northern New England Review, Hotel Amerika, Mississippi Review, The Cincinnati Review, Green Mountains Review, Barrow Street Mudfish, LIT, Pool, jubilat, notnostrums, and Sentence. She lives in New Hampshire and is a Professor of Creative Writing at Landmark College. leslelewispoetry.com.
Raouf Mama is Distinguished Professor of English at Eastern Connecticut State University. His newly published memoir is Fortune’s Favored Child. His previous books are Why Monkeys Live in Trees and Other Stories from Benin, winner of the 2008 National Multicultural Children’s Publication Award; The Barefoot Book of Tropical Tales; Pearls of Wisdom; and Why Goats Smell Bad. Mama regularly travels to various parts of the world to work with teachers, education professionals, and children, using storytelling as a multicultural teaching and motivational tool. He has worked in partnership with UNICEF and the School of African Heritage in promoting education and cultural awareness through storytelling
Paula McLain is the author the New York Times bestseller, The Paris Wife. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan and has been a resident of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. She is also the author the New York Times bestseller, The Paris Wife, two collections of poetry, as well as a memoir, Like Family, and a first novel, A Ticket to Ride. She lives in Cleveland with her family.
Joseph Monninger has published eleven novels and three non-fiction books. His work has appeared in American Heritage, Scientific American, Readers Digest, Glamour, Playboy, and Sports Illustrated, among other publications. He has twice received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and has also received a fellowship from the New Hampshire Council for the Arts. His young adult novel, Baby, was awarded the 2008 award for best children’s literature from the Peace Corps Writers. It was also chosen as a top ten book by YALSA, the American Library Association. He has a new series of adventure books, Stay Alive written for middle grade readers. His new novel, The Major’s Daughter, was just published under the name J.P. Francis. www.joemonninger.com
Paul Muldoon was born in Northern Ireland and educated at the Queen’s University of Belfast. From 1973 to 1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now Howard G. B. Clark ’21 Professor at Princeton University. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. In 2007 he was appointed Poetry Editor of The New Yorker. His main collections of poetry are New Weather (1973), Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting The British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), Hay (1998), Poems 1968-1998 (2001), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), Horse Latitudes (2006), and Maggot (2010). Paul Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature for 1996. He won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his collection, Moy Sand and Gravel. Other awards are the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2005 Aspen Prize for Poetry, and the 2006 European Prize for Poetry. Muldoon is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Blake Nelson’s most recent book is The Prince of Venice Beach. According to Kirkus, “Nelson’s spare style and nuanced portrayal of street kids is strongly reminiscent of the classic work of S.E. Hinton.” His first novel, Girl, was first serialized in Sassy Magazine and was made into a film starring Selma Blaire and Summer Phoenix. His 2006 novel, Paranoid Park, was made into a film by Gus Van Sant. Other titles include Rockstar Superstar and The New Rules of High School. His science fiction novel They Came From Below was a Kliatt Editors Choice pick in 2008. His environmentalist book, Destroy All Cars, has been praised as “smart and entertaining” by the New York Times, and was called “A wonderful novel” by the Los Angeles Times. His novel, Dream School, is the sequel to Girl. www.Blakenelsonteennovelist.blogspot.com
Laurel Neme has camped in the Kalahari, investigated walrus carcasses on Alaska’s Bering Sea beaches, and gotten lost in the Amazon jungle with the Brazilian Federal Police–all in pursuit of knowledge and a better story. She is the author of Animal Investigators: How the World’s First Wildlife Forensics Lab is Solving Crimes and Saving Endangered Species, a “CSI for wildlife” that has been featured on ABC News Nightline, C-SPAN and NPR’s Science Friday. She is a contributor to National Geographic, and also hosts “The WildLife,” a weekly radio show that explores the mysteries of the animal world through interviews with scientists and other wildlife investigators. Laurel is working on a second adult non-fiction book and is awaiting publication of her first picture book “with a purpose”, Orangutan Houdini. http://www.laurelneme.com/
Pamela Painter is the author of three story collections: Getting to Know the Weather, The Long and Short of It, and the FLASH collection, Wouldn’t You Like to Know. She is also the co-author of What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Five Points, Harper’s, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, among others. And in many FLASH anthologies, such as Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction, Micro Fiction, Flash Fiction Forward, and Flash Fiction Funny. She has received grants from The Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts, has won three Pushcart Prizes and Agni Review’s The John Cheever Award for Fiction. Painter lives in Boston and teaches in the Emerson College MFA Program. www.fictionaut.com/users/pamerla-painter.com
Jay Parini is a poet, novelist, biographer, and critic and is the Axinn Professor of English at Middlebury College, Vermont. He is the author of five books of poetry, eight novels, three biographies (including Robert Frost, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner) plus other books of non-fiction including Jesus: The Human Face of God. In 2009, his novel The Last Station was turned into an Academy Award-nominated film. Parini has won various fellowships and awards, including a Guggenheim (1993-1994) and, for his Frost biography, the Chicago Tribune-Heartland Award in 2000. He was the Fowler Hamilton Fellow at Christ Church College, Oxford University, in 1993-1994 and a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of London in 2005-2006. His books have been translated in more than thirty languages, He edited the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature and he writes articles and reviews for many publications, including The Guardian and The Chronicle of Higher Education. www.jayparini.com
Ruth Ann Smalley is a children’s book author and educator living in Albany, New York. A mother of two, freelance writer, wellness educator, and college professor, Ruth Ann offers school programs on gardening, composting, and sustainable living—all themes of her picture book, Sheila Says We’re Weird. A light-hearted look at “green” family life, Sheila Says We’re Weird has won a Moonbeam Award, was chosen as an honor book by both the Society of School Librarians International and Skipping Stones Magazine, and made the shortlist for the Green Earth Book Awards. Her middle-grades novel, Defender of Dirt, is an eco-adventure story about the power of gardening and community. It features sibling protagonists, dive-bombing wrens, composting worms, endangered chickens, and several thousand waggle-dancing honeybees.
Donald Sheehy Donald Sheehy is Professor of English at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. His essays on Frost’s life and work have appeared in such journals as The New England Quarterly, American Literature, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, and The Robert Frost Review and in two Cambridge collections, The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost (2001) and Robert Frost in Context (2014). With Mark Richardson, he is editing Frost’s Collected Letters for Harvard University Press; the first of five volumes was published in February 2014.
Bianca Stone grew up in Vermont and graduated from NYU’s Creative Writing Program. She is the author of Someone Else’s Wedding Vows and several poetry and poetry comic chapbooks. She is also the illustrator of Antigonick, a collaboration with Anne Carson. She is the co-founder and editor of the Monk Books, and chair of the Ruth Stone Foundation. Her poems have appeared in magazines such as American Poetry Review, Tin House, and Crazyhorse. Her blog is at www.poetrycomics.com.
Chrysler Szarlan is the author of The Hawley Book of the Dead, a debut novel brimming with history, suspense and magic. She works part-time as a bookseller at the Odyssey Bookshop, lives in western Massachusetts with her family, and rides her horse in the Hawley Forest whenever possible. An alumnae of Marlboro College, she jogged racehorses and worked as a magician’s assistant before graduating from law school. Visit her at www.chryslerszarlan.com.
Matthew Thomas was born in the Bronx and grew up in Queens. A graduate of the University of Chicago, he has an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, where he received the Graduate Essay Award. We Are Not Ourselves is his first novel and it has already been long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award and the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. He lives with his wife and twin children in New Jersey. http://www.matthewthomasauthor.com/
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Ocean Vuong is the author of two chapbooks: No and Burnings, which was an American Library Association’s Over The Rainbow selection. A recipient of a 2013 Pushcart Prize, he has received fellowships from Kundiman, Poets House, the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, as well as the 2012 Stanley Kunitz Prize and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Poems appear in Poetry, The Nation, American Poetry Review, Quarterly West, Guernica, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Denver Quarterly, among others. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently resides in New York City where he reads chapbook submissions as the managing editor of Thrush Press. www.oceanvuong.tumblr.com/bio.
Afaa Michael Weaver‘s 12th and latest collection, The Government of Nature, received the 2014 Kingsley Tufts Award, given annually to a mid-career poet based on their body of work. Weaver is a native of Baltimore, where he was a factory worker for fifteen years. The Government of Nature is his twelfth collection of poetry; his latest, A Hard Summation, is due this summer from Central Square Press. Also a playwright, his new play is Grip. He has received two Pushcart Awards, the May Sarton Award, and the PDI Award in playwriting from ETA Creative Arts Foundation. He has received fellowships from the NEA, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Pew Foundation, and a Fulbright appointment to Taiwan. As a translator, he works in Chinese. At Simmons College he is the Alumnae Professor of English and director of the Zora Neale Hurston Literary Center. In addition, he is Chairman of the Simmons International Chinese Poetry Conference. www.afaaweaver.net.
Tim Weed’s first novel, Will Poole’s Island, which Kirkus called “Immersive . . . [a] riveting portrayal of early colonial New England,” was published by Namelos Editions in 2014. His short fiction has appeared in Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet, and many other literary journals and anthologies. He is the winner of a Writer’s Digest Popular Fiction Award and his collected stories have been shortlisted for the New Rivers Press Many Voices Project, the Autumn House Fiction Prize, and the Lewis-Clark Press Discovery Award. Based in Vermont and Nantucket, Tim teaches for GrubStreet Writers in Boston and in the MFA Writing program at Western Connecticut State University. He is a featured expert for National Geographic Expeditions in Cuba, Spain, and Patagonia.
Diana Whitney’s first book of poetry, Wanting It, was released in June, 2014 by Harbor Mountain Press. Whitney graduated from Dartmouth College and Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and attended the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Her essays and poems have appeared in many publications, including The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Numero Cinq, and The Crab Orchard Review. Her frank, irreverent parenting column, Spilt Milk, was syndicated in several newspapers, garnered a loyal readership, and is now being collected into a book. Born in England, Diana lives in Brattleboro with her husband, two daughters, and twelve chickens. www.diana-whitney.com
Susan Wolfson is the editor of Northanger Abbey: An Annotated Edition (2014) and coeditor (with Ron Levao) of The Annotated Frankenstein. A Professor of English at Princeton University, her specialty is the literature of the “Long Romantic” period (from 1780 to 1860). She has edited, for the Longman Cultural Editions, John Keats, and with Claudia Johnson, Pride and Prejudice, and with Barry Qualls, Three Tales of Doubles: Mary Shelley’s Transformation, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer. Her critical studies include The Questioning Presence (on Wordsworth and Keats); Formal Charges (on the experimental ventures of Romantic poetry); Borderlines (on gender instability and literary imagination); and Romantic Interactions (on how reading shapes writers). Reading John Keats is due out next year. www.english.princeton.edu/people/susan-wolfson.
Baron Wormser is the author of a memoir, The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet’s Memoir of Living Off the Grid, a novel, Teach Us That Peace, nine books of poetry and three books of non-fiction. In 2000 he was appointed Poet Laureate of Maine and served in that capacity for six years. In 2009 he joined the Fairfield University MFA program. Wormser has received the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry and the Kathryn A. Morton Prize along with fellowships from Bread Loaf, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is the Director of Educational Outreach for the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire and resides in Cabot, Vermont, with his wife. www.baronwormser.com.
Julie Wu graduated from Harvard with a BA in literature, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and received an MD at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. She has received a writing grant from the Vermont Studio Center and is the recipient of a 2012 Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship. Her debut novel, The Third Son, was released to critical acclaim. www.juliewuauthor.com
