Dorothy Allison, Steve Almond, Aimee Bender, Pinckney Benedict, David Benioff, Amy Bloom, Robert Olen Butler, Deborah Eisenberg, Ryan Harty, Howard Hunt, Frances Hwang, Denis Johnson, Marshall N. Klimasewiski, Ellen Litman, Howard Luxenberg, Martha McPhee, Steven Millhauser, Lucia Nevai, Mark Jude Poirier, Natasha Radojcic, Stacey Richter, James Salter, Jim Shepard, Anthony Swofford, Julia Slavin, Elizabeth Tallent, Amanda Eyre Ward, Jung H. Yun
Jim Shepard is the author of seven novels, including most recently
The Book of Aron, five story collections, including
Like You’d Understand,
Anyway—a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize—and editor of the anthology
Writers at the Movies. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife, three children, and three beagles. He teaches at Williams College.
Aimee Bender is the author of three books, the most recent being the short story collection
Willful Creatures. Her short fiction has been published in
Harper's,
Granta,
Tin House,
GQ, the
Paris Review, and others, as well as heard on PRI's This American Life. She teaches creative writing at USC and lives in Los Angeles.
Steve Almond is the author of two story collections,
My Life in Heavy Metal and
The Evil B.B. Chow, the non-fiction book
Candyfreak, the novel
Which Brings Me to You, co-written with Julianna Baggott, and most recently the collection of essays
Not That You Asked: Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions. He lives outside Boston with his wife and baby daughter Josephine.
Susan Bell is author of The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself (W.W. Norton & Co. 2007), and co-author with Mayor Jason West ofDare to Hope: Saving American Democracy, a book of essays on political activism (Miramax, 2005). A former editor at Random House and Conjunctions magazine, she has edited both fiction and nonfiction professionally for twenty years. She has taught a seminar on self-editing in the New School's graduate writing program since 2001.
Anna Keesey is a Portland writer and a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the recipient of a Michener/Copernicus award and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her work has appeared in
Grand Street,
Double-Take, and Houghton Mifflin's
Best American Short Stories series.
Chris Offutt is the author of two story collections.
Kentucky Straight and
Out of the Woods, two books of memoir,
The Same River Twice and
No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home, and the novel
The Good Brother. His work has received awards from the Lannan Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Whiting Foundation. Offutt has two sons and lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
D.A. Powell is the author of Tea (Wesleyan, 1998), Lunch (Wesleyan, 2000) andCocktails (Graywolf, 2004), the latter a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle and the PEN West Literary Awards. Powell is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize, fellowships from the NEA and the James Michener Foundation, and awards from the Boston Review, Prairie Schooner, the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Society of America. He has taught at Harvard, Columbia, the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He is currently on faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Jim Shepard is the author of six novels, including most recently
Project X (Knopf, 2004) and two story collections, including most recently
Like You’d Understand, Anyway (Knopf, 2007), which was nominated for the National Books Award.
Project X won the 20005 Library of Congress/Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, as well as the ALEX Award from the American Library Association. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines,
Harper’s,
McSweeney’s, the
Paris Review, the
Atlantic Monthly,
Esquire,
DoubleTake, the
New Yorker,
Granta, and
Playboy, and he is a columnist on film for the magazine the
Believer. He teaches at Williams College and in the Warren Wilson MFA program, and lives in Williamstown with his wife, Karen, two sons, tiny daughter, and some harried and unreliable dogs.
Jim Krusoe has written five books of poems, a book of stories,
Blood Lake, and two novels,
Iceland, published by Dalkey Archive Press, and
Girl Factory, published by Tin House Books. His stories and poems have appeared in the
Antioch Review,
Bomb,
Denver Quarterly, the
Iowa Review,
Field,
Nort