David Abrams debut novel about the Iraq War, Fobbit, was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2012 and a Best Book of 2012 by Paste Magazine, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Barnes and Noble. It was also featured as part of B&N’s Discover Great New Writers program. He regularly blogs about the literary life at The Quivering Pen. In 2005, he joined the 3rd Infantry Division and deployed to Baghdad in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The journal he kept during that year formed the blueprint for the novel which would later become known as Fobbit. Abrams retired in 2008 after a 20-year career in the active-duty Army as a journalist. David Abrams was born in Pennsylvania and grew up in Jackson, Wyoming. He earned a BA in English from the University of Oregon and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. He now lives in Butte, Montana with his wife.
James Arthur was born in Connecticut and grew up in Canada. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, Ploughshares, and The American Poetry Review. He has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, a residency at the Amy Clampitt House, and a Discovery/The Nation Prize. Charms Against Lightning, his debut poetry collection, is available from Copper Canyon Press as a Lannan Literary Selection. James is currently a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. In September, he will join the faculty of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
Jami Attenberg has written about sex, technology, design, graphic novels, books, television, and urban life for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Salon, Print, The Awl, The Hairpin, New York, Nylon, Details.com, Esquire.com, Babble, eMusic, The Rumpus, and others. She has contributed to numerous anthologies and also wrote Wicked: The Musical: A Pop-up Compendium. Her debut collection of stories, Instant Love, was published by Crown/Shaye Areheart Books in 2006. She is also the author of two novels, The Kept Man and The Melting Season, both published by Riverhead Books. Her third novel, The Middlesteins, was published by Grand Central Publishing. It appeared on The New York Times bestseller list, and will be published in England, Taiwan, Russia, Italy, France, Turkey and The Netherlands in 2013. It was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, where she fights crime in her spare time.
Megan Mayhew Bergman was raised in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. She now lives on a small farm in Shaftsbury, Vermont with her veterinarian husband Bo, two daughters, four dogs, four cats, two goats, a horse, and a handful of chickens. In November 2010, Megan was elected Justice of the Peace for the town of Shaftsbury. She also occasionally teaches literature at Bennington College. Megan graduated from Wake Forest University, and completed graduate degrees at Duke University and Bennington College. She was a fiction scholar and fellow at Breadloaf and received a fellowship from the Millay Colony for the Arts. Scribner published her first story collection, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, in March 2012, and will also release her forthcoming novel Shepherd, Wolf. Her work has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in the New York Times, Best American Short Stories 2011, New Stories from the South 2010, Oxford American, Narrative, Ploughshares, One Story, and elsewhere.
Sophie Cabot Black grew up on a small farm in New England. She has three poetry collections, The Misunderstanding of Nature, which received the Poetry Society of America’s First Book Award, The Descent, which received the 2005 Connecticut Book Award and her new book, The Exchange, which was published in May. Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review.
Chris Bohjalian is the critically acclaimed author of 16 books, including eight New York Times bestsellers. His work has been translated into over 25 languages and three times has been made into movies. His epic novel of the Armenian Genocide, The Sandcastle Girls, was published in paperback in April. His new novel, a reimagining of Romeo and Juliet set in Tuscany at the end of the Second World War, The Light in the Ruins, was published in July. His books have been chosen as Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Hartford Courant, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, Bookpage, and Salon. His awards include the ANCA Arts and Letters Award for The Sandcastle Girls, as well as the Saint Mesrob Mashdots Medal; the New England Society Book Award for The Night Strangers; the New England Book Award; a Boston Public Library Literary Light; a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; and the Anahid Literary Award. His novel, Midwives, was a number one New York Times bestseller, a selection of Oprah’s Book Club, and a New England Booksellers Association Discovery pick. He has written for a wide variety of magazines and newspapers, including the Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, Reader’s Digest, the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine and he has been a weekly columnist in Vermont for the Burlington Free Press since February 1992. Chris graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude from Amherst College, and lives in Lincoln, Vermont with his wife, the photographer Victoria Blewer, and their daughter Grace Experience.
Amy Brill is a writer and producer. Her articles, essays, and short stories have appeared in numerous publications including Salon, Guernica, and Time Out New York, and have been anthologized in Before and After: Stories from New York and Lost and Found. As a broadcast journalist, she received a George Foster Peabody Award for writing MTV’s The Social History of HIV, and she researched, wrote, or produced over a dozen other projects for the network’s pro-social initiatives. She has also produced online projects fostering public dialogue on arts, culture, and society for PBS, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and other organizations. Her first novel, The Movement of Stars, was inspired by the work of Maria Mitchell, the first professional female astronomer in America and has already made several “best of “ lists. A native New Yorker, Amy lives in Brooklyn with her husband. They have two small daughters, neither of whom can yet tie their own shoes.
Christopher Castellani is the son of Italian immigrants and a native of Wilmington, Delaware. He resides in Boston, where he is the artistic director of Grub Street, one of the country’s leading non-profit creative writing centers. He is the author of a new novel All This Talk of Love and two previous critically-acclaimed novels, A Kiss from Maddalena—winner of the Massachusetts Book Award in 2004—and The Saint of Lost Things, a BookSense (IndieBound) Notable Book that was long-listed for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2006. In addition to his work with Grub Street, Christopher is on the faculty of the Warren Wilson MFA program and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Christopher was educated at Swarthmore College, received his Masters in English Literature from Tufts University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Boston University.
Tina Chang is the Poet Laureate of Brooklyn. She is the author of the poetry collections Half-Lit Houses (2004) and Of Gods & Strangers (2011). She is co-editor of the anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond. Her poems have been published in American Poet, McSweeney’s, The New York Times, and Ploughshares, among others. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Poets & Writers, the Van Lier Foundation among others. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and she is also a member of the international writing faculty at the City University of Hong Kong, the first low-residency MFA program to be established in Asia.
Hilary Davidson’ s first novel, The Damage Done— described as a “razor sharp mystery debut” by Publishers Weekly — won the 2011 Anthony Award for Best First Novel, and the Crimespree Award for Best First Novel (also a finalist for the Macavity and Arthur Ellis awards). The sequel, The Next One to Fall, was published in 2012. According to Publishers Weekly, “The rich history and geography of Peru add depth to an engrossing mystery that constantly keeps the reader guessing.” The third novel in the series, Evil in All Its Disguises, was published on March 5, 2013. Hilary won the 2010 Spinetingler Award for Best Short Story for “Insatiable,” which is in the Beat to a Pulp anthology. Hilary is also the author of 18 nonfiction books, including Frommer’s New York City Day by Day and Frommer’s Toronto. Originally from Toronto, she now lives in New York City.
Patrick Donnelly is the author of The Charge (Ausable Press, 2003, since 2009 part of Copper Canyon Press) and Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2012). The latter book was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. He is director of the Poetry Seminar at The Frost Place, an associate editor of Poetry International, a contributing editor of Tran(s)tudies (www.transtudies.org), and has taught at Smith College, Colby College, the Lesley University MFA Program, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and elsewhere. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Slate, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Massachusetts Review, and many other journals. With Stephen D. Miller, Donnelly is co-translator of the Japanese poems in The Wind from Vulture Peak: The Buddhification of Japanese Waka in the Heian Period (Cornell East Asia Series, 2013). Donnelly and Miller’s translations have appeared in Bateau, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Circumference, thedrunkenboat.com, eXchanges, Inquiring Mind, Kyoto Journal, Mead, Metamorphoses, New Plains Review, Noon: The Journal of the Short Poem, Poetry International, Zone 3, and Like Clouds or Mists: Studies and Translations of Nō Plays of the Genpei War. Donnelly is a 2008 recipient of an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Website: http://www.patrickdonnellypoems.com
Amy Dryansky’s newest poetry collection, Grass Whistle, was released in 2013 by Salmon Poetry. Her first book, How I Got Lost So Close To Home, was published by Alice James Books and individual poems have appeared in a variety of anthologies and journals, including Orion, The New England Review and Harvard Review. Dryansky’s received honors/awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She’s also a former Associate at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center at Mt. Holyoke College, where she looked at the impact of motherhood on the work of women poets. Dryansky currently teaches in the writing program at Hampshire College and writes about what it’s like to navigate the territory of mother/artist/poet at her blog, Pokey Mama.
Patricia Fargnoli’s latest book is Winter, Hobblebush Books, 2013. She’s published three other award-winning books of poems and three chapbooks. The NH Poet Laureate from 2006-2009, her awards include: The Robert Frost Foundation Award, The Shelia Mooton Poetry Award, ForeWord Magazine Silver Poetry Award, New Hampshire Literary Award and a MacDowell Fellowship. She’s published widely in such journals at Poetry, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly, Harvard Review, Green Mountains Review etc. A retired clinical social worker, she lives and teaches poetry privately in Walpole, NH
Tom Folsom is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Mad Ones: Crazy Joe Gallo and the Revolution at the Edge of the Underworld. His new book, Hopper: A Journey into the American Dream, tells the story of actor, director, artist and art collector Dennis Hopper. Folsom is also a writer, director, and producer of documentaries, and his work has appeared at Sundance and on A&E and Showtime. He lives in New York City with his wife.
Ross Gay is an American poet and professor. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Against Which and Bringing the Shovel Down. His poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Columbia: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Margie: The American Journal of Poetry and Atlanta Review, and in anthologies including From the Fishouse. His honors include being a Cave Canem Workshop fellow and a Bread Loaf Writers Conference Tuition Scholar, and he received a grant from the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts. He now teaches at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana and the low-residency MFA in poetry program at Drew University.
David Gilbert is the author of the story collection Remote Feed and the novel The Normals. His new novel, & Sons, is the panoramic, deeply affecting story of two interconnected families, an iconic novelist, and the heartbreaking truths that fiction can hide. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, and Bomb. He lives in New York with his wife and three children.
Rigoberto González is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, and the editor of Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing. He is the recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, winner of the American Book Award, The Poetry Center Book Award, The Shelley Memorial Award of The Poetry Society of America, and a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He is contributing editor for Poets & Writers Magazine, on the executive board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle, and is associate professor of English at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey.
Kimiko Hahn is the author of nine collections and often finds that disparate sources have triggered her material–whether an exhumation in The Artist’s Daughter or classical Japanese forms in The Narrow Road to the Interior. Rarified fields of science prompted her latest collection Toxic Flora and continue in Brain Fever (forthcoming). Collaborations have led her to film and the visual arts. Hahn’s most recent award was a Guggenheim Fellowship and she is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, City University of New York. She lives in New York with true crime writer Harold Schechter
Pam Houston is the author of two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, two novels, Sight Hound and Contents May have Shifted, and a collection of essays called A Little More About Me, all published by W.W. Norton. Her stories have been selected for volumes of Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and Best American Short Stories of the Century. She is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA award for contemporary fiction, and The Evil Companions Literary Award and multiple teaching awards. She is the Director of Creative Writing at U.C. Davis and teaches in The Pacific University low residency MFA program, and at writer’s conferences around the country and the world. She lives on a ranch at 9,000 feet in Colorado near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.
Kristopher Jansma grew up in Lincroft, New Jersey. He received his B.A. in The Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University and an M.F.A. in Fiction from Columbia University. Kristopher Jansma’s debut novel, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, was published by Viking/Penguin in March of 2013. Currently, he lives in New York City, where he is an Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing at Manhattanville College and SUNY Purchase. Kristopher Jansma has been named one of Flavorwire’s “Up-and-Coming Culture Makers to Watch in 2013″ and The Millions selected The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards as one their Most Anticipated Books of 2013.
Tom Kizzia‘s stories about the Pilgrim Family won a President’s Award from McClatchy Newspapers. He traveled widely in rural Alaska as a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News. His work has appeared in The Washington Post and been featured on CNN. Tom is a former Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University and a graduate of Hampshire College. His first book, The Wake of the Unseen Object, was named one of the best all-time non-fiction books about Alaska by the state historical society. His new book, Pilgrim’s Wilderness, tells the gripping story of the Pilgrim family’s deep, dark secrets, and the battle that followed their move into the Alaska wilds. He lives in Homer, Alaska.
Jo Knowles is the author of several books for children and young adults. She has a master’s degree in children’s literature and taught writing for children in the MFA program at Simmons College for several years. Some of her awards include a New York Times Notable Book of 2012, Amazon’s Best Middle Grade Books of 2012, An International Reading Association Favorite 2012 Book, an SCBWI Crystal Kite Award, the PEN New England Children’s Book Discovery Award, and YALSA’s Best Fiction for Young Adults. Her novels include Living With Jackie Chan, See You At Harry’s, Pearl, Jumping Off Swings and Lessons From A Dead Girl. Jo lives in Vermont with her husband and son.
Michelle Knudsen is the New York Times bestselling author of more than 40 books for children, including the picture books Library Lion, Argus, and Big Mean Mike, as well as the fantasy novels The Dragon of Trelian and The Princess of Trelian. Formerly a full-time children’s book editor, Michelle continues to edit manuscripts on a freelance basis and teaches children’s book writing at Gotham Writers’ Workshop in NYC. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Lily Koppel is the New York Times bestselling author of The Astronaut Wives Club and The Red Leather Diary. She has written for the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, the Daily Beast, the Huffington Post, and Glamour. She lives in New York City with her husband and their two spacey rescue dogs, Ozzy and Lucky.
Joan Larkin’s recent publications include the twenty-poem chapbook Legs Tipped with Small Claws (Argos Books, 2012) and My Body: New and Selected Poems (Hanging Loose Press, 2007). Blue Hanuman is forthcoming in 2014 from Hanging Loose. Previous books of poetry include Housework, A Long Sound, Cold River, and Sor Juana’s Love Poems (translated with Jaime Manrique). She is currently the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer in Residence at Smith College, on leave from the faulty of Drew University’s MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation. She has taught at Brooklyn College and Sarah Lawrence College, among many other places. Her honors include the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, the Lambda Literary Award , and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Academy of American Poets.
Ada Limón is the author of three collections of poetry, Sharks in the Rivers, This Big Fake World, and Lucky Wreck. She has received fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and won the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry. She is currently a judge for the 2013 National Book Award in Poetry and will join the 2014 faculty for the low-residency MFA-Latin America for Queens University of Charlotte. She is currently finishing her first novel, a book of essays, and a fourth collection of poems. She works as a writer and lives in Kentucky and California.
Anne Marie Macari is the author of four books of poetry, including Red Deer, forthcoming from Persea, and She Heads Into the Wilderness (Autumn House, 2008). In 2000 Macari won the APR/Honickman first book prize for Ivory Cradle, which was followed by Gloryland (2005, Alice James Books). She has also coedited, with Carey Salerno, Lit From Inside: 40 Years of Poetry From Alice James Books. She teaches in the Drew University MFA Program in Poetry & Poetry in Translation.
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Cleopatra Mathis was born and raised in Ruston, Louisiana, of Greek and Cherokee descent. Her first five books of poems were published by Sheep Meadow Press. A sixth and seventh collection of poems, White Sea and Book of Dog, were published by Sarabande Books. Cleopatra Mathis’ work has appeared widely in anthologies, textbooks, magazines and journals. Various prizes for her work include two National Endowment for the Arts grants, in 1984 and 2003; the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poems in 2001; the Peter Lavin Award for Younger Poets from the Academy of American Poets; The Robert Frost Resident Poet Award; The May Sarton Award; and Individual Artist Fellowships in Poetry from both the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and the New Jersey State Arts Council. Most recently, she was the Poetry Fellow at the Dora Maar House in Menerbes, Provence, France, sponsored by the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas. Cleopatra Mathis is the Frederick Sessions Beebe ’35 Professor of the Art of Writing at Dartmouth College, where she has directed the Creative Writing Program.
Megan Marshall grew up in Pasadena, California. Her first biography, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, won the Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography and memoir. Margaret Fuller: A New American Life is Marshall’s second biography, a character-driven narrative grounded in fact that tests the boundaries of the form. Marshall has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. An elected Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society, she also serves on the boards of the Society of American Historians, the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society, and the Copyright Clearance Center. She lives in Belmont, Massachusetts, midway between Boston and Concord, locations that figure prominently in her subjects’ lives.
Archer Mayor is the author of the highly acclaimed, Vermont-based series featuring detective Joe Gunther, which the Chicago Tribune describes as “the best police procedurals being written in America.” He is also the 2004 winner of the New England Independent Booksellers Association Award for Best Fiction–the first time a writer of crime literature has been so honored. Mayor’s critically-acclaimed series of police novels features Lt. Joe Gunther of the Brattleboro, Vermont police department. The books, which have been appearing about once a year since 1988, have been published in five languages (if you count British,) and routinely gather high praise from such sources as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, and many others, often appearing on their “ten best” yearly lists. He lives in Newfane, Vermont.
Roland Merullo was born in Boston, Massachusetts and brought up in Revere, MA, a working-class Italian American community five miles from downtown Boston. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH, in 1971, and Brown University in 1975, where he also earned a Master’s in Russian Language and Literature the following year. Merullo has published nine novels, including 2000 Revere Beach Boulevard which was a finalist for the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Prize. Breakfast with Buddha was nominated for the Dublin IMPAC International Literary Award and American Savior won the Honor Award in fiction from the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Merullo’s nonfiction writing includes Revere Beach Elegy, a memoir that won the 2000 Massachusetts Book Award for Non-Fiction, and the travel book The Italian Summer. In 2012 he published 2 new books, Lunch With Buddha and The Talk-Funny Girl, which won the 2012 Alex Award. He currently lives in Massachusetts with his wife and two daughters.
Richard Michelson is a prize-winning author whose poetry has been praised by Nobel Laureate Elie Weisel as “deeply moving.” Battles & Lullabies was selected by ForeWord as one of the 12 best books of 2006. Michelson’s poems have appeared in many anthologies, including The Norton Introduction to Poetry. Clemson University named Michelson the R. J. Calhoun Distinguished Reader in American Literature for 2008, and he was the featured poet for the 20th Anniversary edition of Image Journal. New work recently appeared in The Harvard Review. He is the current Poet Laureate in Northampton, MA.
Eleanor Morse is a graduate of Swarthmore College, spent a number of years living in Botswana in the 1970s. She earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from Vermont College. Her novel, An Unexpected Forest, published by Down East Books, won the Independent Publisher’s Gold Medalist Award for Best Regional Fiction in the Northeast U.S. and was also selected as the Winner of Best Published Fiction by the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance at the 2008 Maine Literary Awards. Eleanor Morse has taught in adult education programs, in prisons, and in university systems, both in Maine and in southern Africa. Her new book, White Dog Fell from the Sky, tells the story of three people in Botswana in apartheid South Africa in 1976. She currently works as an adjunct faculty member with Spalding University’s MFA Writing program in Louisville, Kentucky. She lives on Peaks Island, Maine.
Andrew Nagorski is an award-winning journalist and is Vice President and Director of Public Policy at the EastWest Institute, a New York-based international affairs think tank. During a long career at Newsweek, he served as the magazine’s bureau chief in Hong Kong, Moscow, Rome, Bonn, Warsaw and Berlin. He is the author of several books including his latest, Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power, and has written for countless publications
Michael Nethercott
is the author of new mystery series set in the 1950s. A traditional whodunit with supernatural undercurrents, his debut novel —The Séance Society (St Martin’s Press)— features the detective team of private eye Lee Plunkett and his scholarly Irish-born colleague, Mr. O’Nelligan. Nethercott has won The Black Orchid Novella Award (for traditional mysteries), the Vermont Playwrights Award, the Nor’easter Play Writing Contest, and the Clauder Competition (Best Vermont Play); and is a finalist for the Shamus Award. His tales of mystery and the supernatural have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies including Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Best Crime and Mystery Stories of the Year, Thin Ice: Crime Stories by New England Writers, Crimestalkers Casebook, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He lives with his wife in Guilford, Vermont and is known locally as the creator and writer of The Forest of Mystery, a large-scale outdoors theatrical event.
Lesléa Newman is the author of 63 books for readers of all ages including the poetry collections, Still Life With Buddy, Signs of Love, Nobody’s Mother, I Remember: Hachiko Speaks (chapbook) and October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard. Her literary awards include poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Fellowship Foundation. A past poet laureate of Northampton, MA, she currently teaches at Spalding University’s brief-residency MFA in Writing Program.
Howard Norman is a three-time winner of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a winner of the Lannan Award for fiction. His 1987 novel, The Northern Lights, was nominated for a National Book Award, as was his 1994 novel The Bird Artist. He is also author of the novels The Museum Guard, The Haunting of L, and Devotion. His books have been translated into twelve languages. His new book, I Hate to Leave this Beautiful Place, is a memoir structured around five “incidents of arresting strangeness” in the author’s life. Norman teaches in the MFA program at the University of Maryland. He lives in Washington, D.C., and Vermont with his wife and daughter.
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Meghan O’Rourke began her career as one of the youngest editors in the history of The New Yorker. Since then, she has served as culture editor and literary critic for Slate as well as poetry editor and advisory editor for The Paris Review. Her essays, criticism, and poems have appeared in Slate, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Redbook, Vogue, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and Best American Poetry. O’Rourke is also the author of the poetry collections Once and Halflife, which was a finalist for both the Patterson Poetry Prize and Britain’s Forward First Book Prize. She was awarded the inaugural May Sarton Poetry Prize, the Union League Prize for Poetry from the Poetry Foundation, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and a Front Page Award for her cultural criticism. Her memoir, The Long Goodbye, was written after the death of her mother, was published to critical acclaim. A graduate of Yale University, she has taught at Princeton, The New School, and New York University. She lives in Brooklyn, where she grew up, and Marfa, TX.
Roxana Robinson was born in Pine Mountain, Kentucky and grew up in New Hope, Pennsylvania. She graduated from Buckingham Friends School, in Lahaska, and from The Shipley School, in Bryn Mawr. She attended Bennington College and studied with Bernard Malamud and Howard Nemerov. She received a B.A. degree in English Literature from the University of Michigan. Ms. Robinson has received Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. She is a critically acclaimed fiction writer, the author of five novels including Cost and the forthcoming novel Sparta and three collections of short stories. Her work has been widely anthologized and broadcast on National Public Radio. Four of her works have been chosen Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times, and she was named a Literary Lion by The New York Public Library. She reviews books for The Washington Post and her essays have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Vogue, House and Garden, Tin House, Harper’s, and other publications.
Rosie Schaap has been a bartender, a fortuneteller, a librarian at a paranormal society, an English teacher, an editor, a preacher, a community organizer, and a manager of homeless shelters. A contributor to This American Life and npr.org, she writes the monthly “Drink” column for The New York Times Magazine. Her memoir, Drinking With Men, was published in January by Riverhead Books.
Harold Schechter is a professor of American literature at Queens College, the City University of New York. His essays have appeared in various newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the International Herald Tribune. Among his more than thirty published books are a series of historical true-crime narratives about America’s most infamous serial killers, a quartet of mystery novels featuring Edgar Allan Poe, and an anthology of American true crime writing published by the Library of America. He is also the editor of the Kent State University Press True Crime History Series. His most recent book is The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, The Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation (forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/New Harvest).
Christine Schutt is the author of a short-story collections Nightwork and A Night, A Day, Another Night, Summer. The former was chosen by poet John Ashbery as the best book of 1996 for the Times Literary Supplement. Her first novel , Florida, was a National Book Award finalist for fiction in 2004 and her second novel, All Souls, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist in 2009. Her new novel, Prosperous Friends, is out now from Grove Press.
Jacqueline Sheehan is a fiction writer and essayist. She is also a psychologist. Her first novel, Truth, was published in 2003 by Free Press of Simon and Schuster. Her second novel, Lost & Found, was published 2007 by Avon, Harper Collins. Lost & Found has been on the New York Times Bestseller List and has been optioned for film by Katherine Heigl, star of Grey’s Anatomy. Her third novel, Now & Then, was published in July 2009 by Avon, Harper Collins and her most recent novel, Picture This, was published in 2012. In 2005, she was the editor of the anthology Women Writing in Prison. This anthology is the culmination of eight years of writing workshops sponsored by Voices from Inside, an advocacy group for incarcerated women. Her books have been published in over eight countries. Jacqueline teaches workshops at Grub Street in Boston and Writers in Progress in Florence, Massachusetts.
Alexis Smith grew up in Soldotna, Alaska, and Seattle, Washington. She attended Mount Holyoke College, Portland State University, and Goddard College, where she earned an MFA in Creative Writing. Her writing has appeared in Tarpaulin Sky and on Powells.com. Her first novel, Glaciers, was published to critical acclaim. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon, with her son, two cats, and their beloved view of the St. Johns Bridge.
Daniel Smith began his career as a staff editor at The Atlantic Monthly. He has published articles, essays, and reviews in The American Scholar, The Atlantic, Granta, n+1, New York, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, and Slate, among other places, and his work has appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing. He is the author of two books: Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Hearing Voices and the Borders of Sanity ), and Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety ), He also served as associate editor of The American Idea: The Best of The Atlantic Monthly — 150 Years of Writers and Thinkers Who Shaped Our History. Smith holds the Mary Ellen Donnelly Critchlow Endowed Chair in English at The College of New Rochelle. He is the co-producer and co-host, with Liz Hynes, of the n+1 podcast
Patricia Smith is the author of six books of poetry, including Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the 2013 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Phillis Wheatley Award, and finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Balcones Prize. She also authored Blood Dazzler, a finalist for the National Book Award, and Teahouse of the Almighty, a National Poetry Series selection. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The New York Times, TriQuarterly, Tin House, The Washington Post, and in both Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. Her contribution to the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir won the Robert L. Fish Award from the Mystery Writers of America for the best debut story of the year and is upcoming in Best American Mystery Stories 2013. A 2012 fellow at both MacDowell and Yaddo, she is also a two-time Pushcart Prize winner, recipient of a Lannan fellowship and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history. She is currently working on a book of short stories, a poetry volume combining text and 19th century African-American photos, and a libretto for City Steam, a celebration of the re-opening of Philadelphia’s Dilworth Plaza. Patricia is a professor at the College of Staten Island and an instructor in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College, where she is currently serving as Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities. She is married to Bruce DeSilva, the Edgar Award-winning author of the Liam Mulligan crime novels.
Walter Stahr was born in Massachusetts, grew up in Southern California, and attended the Phillips Exeter Academy, Stanford University and Harvard Law School. After a twenty-five year career as a lawyer he returned to his first love, American history, to research and write a biography of John Jay. He is the author of John Jay: Founding Father and Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man. Stahr lives, with his wife Masami and two children, in Exeter, New Hampshire, and Newport Beach, California.
Tanya Lee Stone studied English at Oberlin College and was an editor of children’s nonfiction for many years. She also has a Master’s Degree. She teaches writing at Champlain College. After many years as an editor, Tanya moved to Vermont and returned to writing. This award-winning author has written titles that include the young adult novel, A Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl, Up Close: Ella Fitzgerald, picture books Elizabeth Leads the Way, Sandy’s Circus, and Who Says Women Can’t Be Doctors? and narrative nonfiction; Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to, The Good, the Bad, and the Barbie, and Courage Has No Color. A new picture book about Jane Addams called The House that Jane Built is forthcoming.
Larry Tye is a non-fiction author and journalist best known for his 2009 New York Times bestselling biography Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend, the story of Negro Leagues pitcher Satchel Paige. From 1986 to 2001, Tye worked as a journalist at The Boston Globe, covering medicine, the environment, sports and national newsTye was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1993 – 1994 and has won a series of major newspaper awards, including the Livingston Award for Young Journalists and the Edward J. Meeman Award for Environmental Journalism. Two of Tye’s books, one on the Pullman porters and another on electroconvulsive therapy, have been adapted into documentary films. Tye’s latest book is Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero.
Steve Yarbrough is the author of nine books. His most recent novel, Realm of Last Chances, was published by Knopf in August, 2013. His other novels include Safe from the Neighbor( finalist for both the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for fiction and the Massachusetts Book Award), The End of California (finalist for the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award), Prisoners of War (finalist for the 2005 PEN/Faulkner Award), Visible Spirits , and The Oxygen Man (winner the California Book Award, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, and the Mississippi Authors Award) plus three story collections Veneer , Mississippi History, and Family Men. His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and has also been published in Ireland, the UK, the Netherlands, Japan and Poland. In 2010, he won the Richard Wright Award for Literary Excellence. The son of Mississippi Delta farmers, Steve is currently a professor in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College in Boston. He has two daughters–Tosia and Lena–and is married to the Polish literary translator and essayist Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough. They live in Stoneham, Massachusetts.
