Jayne Anne Phillips was born and raised in West Virginia. Her first book of stories, Black Tickets, published in 1979 when she was 26, won the prestigious Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, awarded by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Featured in Newsweek, Black Tickets was pronounced "stories unlike any in our literature . . . a crooked beauty" by Raymond Carver and established Phillips as a writer "in love with the American language." She was praised by Nadine Gordimer as "the best short story writer since Eudora Welty" and Black Tickets has since become a classic of the short story genre.

Since then, Phillips has published four novels and another collection of stories, all highly regarded. Her most recent novel, Lark & Termite, which, according to a New York Times book review, "renders what is realistically impossible with such authority that the reader never questions its truth." Phillips is currently Professor of English and Director of the MFA Program at Rutgers-Newark.

Tony Hoagland's poems have been described as moving unerringly with wit and irony, like an arrow through its target—we, the readers—with exhilarating results. His poems sprint across the page and unexpectedly blow apart a single moment, exposing its contradictory nature—and often our folly. Hoagland explores the spiritual bereftness of American satisfaction, creating poetry that is scathing, funny, rich, and refreshingly intelligent.

He is the author of three volumes of poetry: Sweet Ruin, winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry; Donkey Gospel, winner of the James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets; and What Narcissism Means to Me, as well as a collection of essays about poetry, Real Sofistakashun, all by Graywolf Press. He currently teaches in the poetry program at the University of Houston.

 

Tim O'Brien is the author of Going After Cacciato, winner of the 1979 National Book Award in fiction, and The Things They Carried, which was named by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of l990, received the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award in fiction, and was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1993 the French edition of The Things They Carried received the prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger. In the Lake of the Woods was named by Time magazine as the best novel of 1994. The book also received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians and was selected as one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times. His other books are If I Die in a Combat Zone, Northern Lights, and The Nuclear Age. His two most recent books, Tomcat in Love and July, July, were national bestsellers. This summer, his essay, "Telling Tales," on the craft of fiction appeared in The Atlantic Fiction Issue.

O'Brien's short stories have appeared in Esquire, Harper's, Atlantic, Playboy, Granta, Gentleman's Quarterly, The New Yorker, and in several editions of The O. Henry Prize Stories, the Pushcart Prize, and Best American Short Stories. In 1987 he received the National Magazine Award for his story "The Things They Carried," which was also selected for inclusion in the Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. O'Brien has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

 

ZZ Packer is the author of the short story collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, a PEN/Faulkner finalist and a New York Times Notable Book. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Story, Ploughshares, Zoetrope and The Best American Short Stories for both 2000 and 2004 and have been read on NPR's Selected Shorts. Her nonfiction has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Magazine, The American Prospect, Essence, O, The Believer and Salon. She is a contributor to The Huffington Post and has appeared several times as a commentator on NPR's Talk of the Nation, and MSNBC. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and was recently named one of America's Young Innovators by Smithsonian Magazine as well as one of America's Best Young novelists by Granta Magazine.

 

Lee Montgomery is executive editor at Tin House magazine and editorial director of Tin House Books. She is the author of The Things Between Us, A Memoir, Searching for Emily: Illustrated, and the story collection Whose World Is This?, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. Tender, poignant, and at times hilarious, the women in Whose World Is This? turn common notions of love, compassion, and tradition upside down as they show us how vulnerability, although dangerous, is what makes life astonishingly beautiful and reality strangely unreal.

 

Hailed by Larry McMurtry "[o]ne of our finest writers," Francine Prose is the author of twelve novels, including Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award. Her newest book, Goldengrove (Harper Collins, 2008), was released to immediate critical acclaim. In all, she has written twelve novels, two story collections, a collection of novellas, four children's books, and several works of nonfiction.

Prose is a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine, for which she has written such controversial essays as "Scent of A Woman's Ink" and "I Know Why the Caged Bird Can't Read," and Bomb magazine. She writes regularly on art for The Wall Street Journal. A film of her novel, Household Saints, was released in 1993. She lives in New York City.

 

Whether writing about intimacy or alienation, Claudia Rankine's voice is one of unflinching and unrelenting candor, and her poetry is some of the most innovative and thoughtful to emerge in recent years. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, and educated at Williams College and Columbia University, Rankine is the author of four collections of poetry, including the award-winning Nothing in Nature is Private. In The End of the Alphabet and Plot, she welds the cerebral and the spiritual, the sensual and the grotesque. Her latest book, Don't Let Me Be Lonely—an experimental multi-genre project that blends poetry, essays, and image—is an experimental and deeply personal exploration of the condition of fragmented selfhood in contemporary America. She lives and teaches in California.