Julia Alvarez is the author of five books of fiction, including How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies, as well as a book of essays, five collections of poetry, and work for younger readers, including Return to Sender and the Tia Lola stories. Her honors include being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, winning the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature, and being named Latina Magazine’s “Woman of the Year.” She lives in Vermont, where she is a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College.
Mira Bartók is a Chicago-born artist and the author of the 2011 New York Times best-selling illustrated memoir, The Memory Palace, as well as twenty-eight arts and culture books for children. Her writing has also appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies and has been noted in The Best American Essays series. She lives in Western Massachusetts where she runs Mira’s List, a blog that helps artists find funding and residencies all over the world, and North of Radio, a multi-media collaborative.
Richard Bausch is the author of eleven novels and eight collections of stories, including his most recent, Something is Out There. A past Chancellor of The Fellowship of Southern Writers, he is currently The Moss Chair of Excellence in the Writing Program at the University of Memphis. A master of the short story form, his stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, Harper’s, and The Best American Short Stories. He has won awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and many other organizations.
Jeanne Marie Beaumont is author of Burning of the Three Fires, Curious Conduct, and Placebo Effects, winner of the National Poetry Series. She co-edited The Poets’ Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications including Good Poems for Hard Times, The Manhattan Review, The Nation, Poetry Daily, The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror 2007, and World Literature Today. She won the 2009 Dana Award for Poetry. She lives in Manhattan and teaches at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd St. Y and in the Stonecoast MFA program.
Janis Bellow teaches literature at Tufts University. She was married to Saul Bellow from 1989 until his death in 2005. She spends as much time as possible in Vermont, where she lives for several months each year with her daughter Rosie.
David Blistein has been writing professionally for many years, while simultaneously immersing himself in a wide range of spiritual traditions. His work presents intriguing new perspectives on history, nature, psychology, and spirituality. In Real Time, he encounters people from throughout history—sinners and saints, kings and queens, artists and philosophers, warriors and peacemakers. While each character has his or her own revelations and insights to offer, they share a common message: until we understand, accept, and complete our old stories, we cannot begin writing new ones.
Ken Burns has been making documentary films for more than 30 years, producing and directing some of the most celebrated documentaries ever made, including The Civil War; Baseball; Jazz; Brooklyn Bridge; Statue of Liberty; Huey Long; Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery; Frank Lloyd Wright; Mark Twain; Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson; The War; and The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. Ken’s films have won twelve Emmy Awards and two Oscar nominations, and in September of 2008, at the News & Documentary Emmy Awards, Ken was honored by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Roy Blount, Jr. is the author of twenty books, including Alphabet Juice, Hail, Hail Euphoria, and his new book, Alphabetter Juice. A former president of the Authors Guild, Blount is a humorist, novelist, journalist, dramatist, lyricist, lecturer, reviewer, screenwriter, anthologist, and columnist. He is a member of the most literary band in America, The Rock Bottom Remainders, who perform to raise money for charity, and is a panelist on the NPR news quiz show, “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!”
Tom Bodett is an author and a radio anomaly. He lived in Alaska for twenty-five years, where he left a promising career building houses to become a writer, and subsequently, a commentator on All Things Considered. The author of seven books, he has also written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and Redbook. His voice has been heard on Saturday Night Live, National Geographic Explorer, and Steven Spielberg’s Animaniacs. Bodett is a panelist on the NPR news quiz show, “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!”, and he will leave the light on for you.
Victoria Bond and T.R. Simon are close friends and the co-authors of Zora and Me, winner of the Coretta Scott King-John Steptoe New Talent Award and an Edgar Award nominee. A fictionalized yet revelatory account of Zora Neale Hurston’s childhood experiences with her best friend Carrie, this is the first book not written by Hurston to be endorsed by the Zora Neale Hurston Trust. Well suited for interpreting the early origins of Hurston’s life as both field anthropologist and writer, Simon has an M.A. in Anthropology, and Bond holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. They both live in New York City.
Teju Cole was born to Nigerian parents and grew up in Lagos. At fifteen, Cole published cartoons regularly in Prime People, Nigeria’s version of Vanity Fair, and two years later he moved to the United States. He is the author of two critically acclaimed books: Every Day is for the Thief, a novella illustrated with his photographs; and the novel Open City, which was published in February. In 2010, he was named by The New Yorker as one of the “20 Under 40″ writers to watch this decade. He is working on his Ph.D. in art history.
Melissa Coleman is the author of This Life Is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone. A New York Times bestseller and an Indie Next Pick for May 2011, it was excerpted in O, The Oprah Magazine, and was a People’s Pick in People Magazine. Coleman is also a columnist for Maine and Maine Home + Design magazines and she serves on the board of the Telling Room, a Portland writing center for children. She lives in Freeport, Maine, with her husband and twin daughters.
Susan Conley is the author of Foremost Good Fortune, a critically acclaimed book about living in Beijing with her family for over two years. She is the cofounder of the Telling Room, a writer’s workshop and literary hub located in Portland, Maine. She has also worked as an associate editor at Ploughshares, and she has led creative writing and literature seminars at Emerson College in Boston. Conley’s work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, The Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and other literary magazines.
Nicholas Delbanco is the Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Michigan, where he also directs the prestigious Hopwood Awards Program. For twenty years he taught at Bennington College, where he co-founded (with the late John Gardner) the Bennington Writing Workshops. He is the author of twenty-five books; his most recent work of non-fiction is Lastingness: The Art of Old Age, and his most recent work of fiction is Sherbrookes, a reconceived version of his Vermont trilogy (Possession, Sherbrookes, and Stillness) which appeared in the late 1970’s.
Stephen Dobyns is the author of fifteen books of poetry, including Concurring Beasts, a National Poetry Series award winner; Cemetery Nights, a Mellville Cane Award winner; and most recently, Winter’s Journey. He is also the author of a collection of essays on poetry entitled Next Word, Better Word, and twenty-one novels, many of which are thrillers or mysteries. The recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Dobyns is currently on the faculty at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.
Anthony Doerr was born in Cleveland and has lived in Africa, New Zealand, and Italy. He is the author of the short story collections The Shell Collector and Memory Wall, the novel About Grace, and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World. He has been awarded the Rome Prize, the Discover Prize, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, two O. Henry Prizes and the 2010 Story Prize. In 2007, the British literary magazine Granta placed Doerr on its list of 21 Best Young American Novelists.
Mark Doty‘s Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. His eight books of poems also include School of the Arts, Source, and My Alexandria. He has published four volumes of nonfiction prose as well. His numerous awards include the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, two Lambda Literary Awards, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Doty is the only American poet to have received the T.S. Eliot Prize in the U.K.
Martín Espada has published seventeen books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator. His work has been translated into ten languages, and collections of his poems have recently been published in Spain, Puerto Rico, and Chile. The Republic of Poetry received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His most recent collection, The Trouble Ball, was just released this spring. A former tenant lawyer, Espada is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Dana Hand is the pen name under which Will Howarth and Anne Matthews have written Deep Creek, a compelling work of historical fiction about the unsolved 1887 murders of more than thirty Chinese gold miners on a branch of Idaho’s Snake River. Under their own names, they have published a total of eighteen books on American history, literature and public issues. Howarth, a Princeton historian, first learned of the events at Deep Creek while on a freelance writing assignment for National Geographic. Matthews writes about American places that face sudden change, and her book Where the Buffalo Roam, on the depopulating of the Great Plains, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in nonfiction.
Kevin Hawkes has illustrated and/or written over forty-five picture books and novels for children, including New York Times bestsellers Library Lion, Weslandia and My Little Sister Ate One Hare and, most recently, A Pig Parade Is a Terrible Idea. He is known for his unusual perspectives, rich colors and dry sense of humor. Hawkes began his career by working in a Boston bookstore, and he now lives in Gorham, Maine, where his wife and children keep him focused on the important things in life: gardening, tree forts and chocolate chip cookies.
Sara J. Henry is the author of Learning to Swim, a critically acclaimed psychological thriller set in Vermont’s Champlain Valley and in the adjoining Canadian province of Quebec. A former editor at Rodale Books and at Women’s Sports & Fitness magazine, Henry has a master’s degree from Carleton University in Ottawa and is an alumna of the Squaw Valley Writers Conference. She lives on a dirt road in southern Vermont with at least one too many dogs.
David Klass has published seventeen award-winning young adult novels, including California Blue, You Don’t Know Me, and Firestorm, an environmental thriller and the first novel endorsed by Greenpeace. His most recent book, Stuck on Earth, features a snail-like alien who inhabits the brain of a fourteen-year-old boy. Klass has also written more than thirty screenplays, including Kiss the Girls, In the Time of the Butterflies and Walking Tall, and in 2010, he was a writer-producer for television’s Law and Order: Criminal Intent. He lives with his wife and two children in Manhattan.
Caroline Leavitt is the author of nine novels, including Girls In Trouble, Coming Back To Me, Living Other Lives, Into Thin Air, Family, Jealousies, Lifelines and Meeting Rozzy Halfway. Her most recent, Pictures of You, is a New York Times bestseller and a San Francisco Chronicle Editor’s Choice “Lit Pick.” Leavitt is a book critic for The Boston Globe and for People magazine, and she has appeared on The Today Show and NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show.
Michael Levy is the author of Kosher Chinese, an irreverent tale of an American Jew serving in the Peace Corps in rural China. Levy returns frequently to Guiyang to check in on his students and visit the basketball courts where he momentarily attained stardom. While in the United States, he keeps strictly kosher; in China he eats anything with four legs except the table. He can be found writing at coffee shops all over the U.S., and at tea houses in China. He currently teaches in Brooklyn, New York, at Saint Ann’s School.
David Macaulay is the internationally acclaimed author and illustrator of twenty-five books, many of which explore and explain architectural and engineering feats, the hows and whys of a variety of technologies, and the amazing inner workings of the human body. His newest book, Built to Last, brings together perennial favorites Cathedral, Castle and Mosque with new full color illustrations. Macaulay is the recipient of a Macarthur Fellowship, a Caldecott Medal, an American Institute of Architects Medal, and numerous other awards. He lives in Vermont.
Kate Messner writes for children of all ages, and this year she has three new books coming out: Marty McGuire, a chapter book about a spunky girl who would rather catch frogs than play dress-up; Sea Monster’s First Day, a picture book inspired in part by Vermont’s legendary lake monster, Champ; and Over and Under the Snow, which reveals the hidden worlds of animals in the winter. Messner is a middle-school English teacher as well as an author, and she and her family live in Plattsburgh, New York.
Lenelle Moïse, the 2010-2012 Poet Laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts, and the spring 2011 Performance Artist in Residence at Northwestern University, is a spoken word poet, a playwright, a musician and a performance artist. Her jazz-infused and hip-hop bred poetry explores Haitian-American identity, creative resistance, and the intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, and spirit. Moise has released several CDs featuring her performance poetry and poly-rhythmic music.
Thomas Powers is the author of eight books, including nonfiction titles The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA, Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb, Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda, and The Killing of Crazy Horse. Powers won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1971, and he has contributed to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, The Nation, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone. He lives in Vermont.
Monique Proulx is one of Quebec’s most popular authors. A novelist, story writer and screenwriter, she has published five previous works of fiction, including The Heart Is an Involuntary Muscle, which was a finalist for the 2002 Governor General’s Award for fiction (French language) and a selection for the 2004 CBC Canada Reads competition. Her newest book, Wildlives, was nominated for a 2009 Governor Generals’ Literary Award for Translation and the Quebec Writers Federation Translation Prize. She lives in Montreal, Quebec.
Monique Proulx appears courtesy of the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in Montreal, Quebec.
Lawrence Raab is the author of seven collections of poems, most recently The History of Forgetting. In addition, with Stephen Dunn he has published a chapbook of collaborative poems, Winter at the Caspian Sea. Raab was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1993, and a National Poetry Series winner for What We Don’t Know About Each Other. His poems have appeared in several editions of Best American Poetry and in Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he is the Morris Professor of Rhetoric at Williams College.
Benjamin Taylor is the author of a book of essays, Into the Open, and two novels, Tales out of School, and The Book of Getting Even. He is the editor of Saul Bellow: Letters, and his travel memoir, Naples Declared, is scheduled for publication in 2012. A longtime member of the Graduate Writing Program faculty at The New School, Taylor has also taught at Washington University in St. Louis, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, Bennington College, and the Graduate Writing Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia.
Luis Alberto Urrea was born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and an American mother. He is the author of The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Across the Wire, By the Lake of Sleeping Children, Into the Beautiful North, and the graphic novel Mr. Mendoza’s Paintbrush. The Devil’s Highway, a true story about a group of illegal immigrants, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. His fiction, poetry, and journalism have also been recognized with a Lannan Literary Award, a Christopher Award, the Kiriyama Prize, an American Book Award, and a Western States Book Award. Urrea lives outside Chicago and is a professor at the University of Illinois.
Ellen Doré Watson’s fourth and most recent full-length collection of poems is Dogged Hearts. Her honors include a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship for The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems of Adélia Prado. She serves as Director of the Poetry Center at Smith College, poetry and translation editor of The Massachusetts Review, and teaches on the faculty of the Drew University Low-Residency MFA program in poetry and translation.
Rita Williams-Garcia is the author of seven novels for young readers, the most recent of which is One Crazy Summer, winner of the 2011 Coretta Scott King Award and the 2011 Scott O’Dell Prize for Historical Fiction, a 2011 Newbery Honor Book, and a 2010 National Book Award finalist. Known for her realistic portrayal of teens of color and her sensitive exploration of contemporary issues, in this newest book she turns her attention to the Black Panthers and the 1960s. Williams-Garcia is a faculty member of the MFA Program in Writing for Children and Young People at Vermont College, and she lives in New York City.
Kathleen Winter has written dramatic and documentary scripts for Sesame Street and CBC Television. Her collection of short stories, boYs , won the Metcalf-Rooke award and the 2008 Winterset Award. Her novel Annabel became a #1 bestseller in Canada and was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Award, and the 2011 Orange Prize. She was born in the industrial northeast of England and lives in Montreal with her husband and daughters.
Kathleen Winter appears courtesy of the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in Montreal, Quebec.
Monica Youn is the author of two books of poetry: Ignatz, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2010, and Barter. She has been awarded fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Stanford University, where she was a Stegner fellow. She is currently the Brennan Center Fellow in Constitutional Law at NYU Law School. Her work there has been recognized by the New Leaders Council, which named her one of their 40 Under 40 nationwide leaders for 2010.
Kevin Young is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebellion, which has been featured on NPR. His Jelly Roll: A Blues, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. His book The Grey Album: Music, Shadows, Lies won the 2010 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize and is forthcoming in 2012. He is the Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English, as well as Curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University in Atlanta.
Alexi Zentner‘s fiction has appeared (or is forthcoming) in The Atlantic Monthly, Narrative Magazine, Tin House, Glimmer Train, The Walrus, and Slice Magazine. His short story “Trapline” was awarded the 2008 Narrative Prize and was selected for the Best American Short Stories 2009 list of “100 Other Distinguished Stories of 2008.” Touch, Zentner’s first novel, was selected as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and a Knopf Canada New Face of Fiction pick. Born and raised in Kitchener, Ontario, he currently lives in Ithaca, New York.
