Charles Simic was born on May 9, 1938, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where he had a traumatic childhood during World War II. In 1953 he emigrated from Yugoslavia with his mother and brother to join his father in the United States. They lived in and around Chicago until 1958.

His first poems were published in 1959, when he was twenty-one. His first full-length collection of poems, What the Grass Says, was published the following year. Since then he has published more than sixty books in the U.S. and abroad, among them My Noiseless Entourage (Harcourt, 2005); Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), for which he received the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize; The Voice at 3:00 AM: Selected Late and New Poems (2003); Night Picnic (2001); The Book of Gods and Devils (2000); Jackstraws (1999), which was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times; Walking the Black Cat (1996), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; A Wedding in Hell (1994); Hotel Insomnia (1992); The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems (1990), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Selected Poems: 1963-1983 (1990); and Unending Blues (1986).

 

 

Tim O'Brien. Author. B.A., Macalester College, political science, 1968. Although against the Vietnam War, he was drafted in 1968 and served until 1970. Assigned to Third Platoon, A Company, Fifth Battalion, Forty-sixth Infantry as a foot soldier; awarded the Purple Heart. Postgraduate study, School of Government, Harvard University, 1970; interned at the Washington Post. National affairs reporter, Washington Post, 1974-75. Wrote several novels, including Northern Lights (1975), set in the northern Minnesota region, and Going after Cacciato (1978), based on his Vietnam War experience. Contributor to national magazines. O. Henry Award, 1976 and 1978; Best American Short Stories Award, 1977; National Book Award for Fiction, 1979. His war memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973), was named Outstanding Book of 1973 by the New York Times.

Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of the internationally acclaimed Corpus Christi: Stories. His work has been widely published and anthologized in places such as The Paris Review and Tin House, and in 2006, he received a National Book Award for emerging writers. A graduate of The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is the Director of Creative Writing at Harvard. For more information, visit www.bretanthonyjohnston.com.
 

Bruce Weigl has produced numerous volumes of poetry, three collections of essays, and a noted memoir, The Circle of Hanh, as well as translating and publishing books of Vietnamese poetry. His most recent poetry collection is Declension in the Village of Chung Luong (2006, Ausable Press). Weigl was sent to Vietnam six months after graduating from high school in Lorain, Ohio, and his experiences in that war and on his return to the U.S., combined with his enormous poetic talent nurtured at Oberlin College, created “an eloquent spokesman for an entire generation of Americans whose lives were broken by the war and a country whose moral confusion desperately needed addressing.” After teaching for many years at Penn State, he returned in 1998 to Lorain, Ohio where he holds the position of Distinguished Visiting Writer at Lorain County Community College.

Tim O'Brien. Author. B.A., Macalester College, political science, 1968. Although against the Vietnam War, he was drafted in 1968 and served until 1970. Assigned to Third Platoon, A Company, Fifth Battalion, Forty-sixth Infantry as a foot soldier; awarded the Purple Heart. Postgraduate study, School of Government, Harvard University, 1970; interned at the Washington Post. National affairs reporter, Washington Post, 1974-75. Wrote several novels, including Northern Lights (1975), set in the northern Minnesota region, and Going after Cacciato (1978), based on his Vietnam War experience. Contributor to national magazines. O. Henry Award, 1976 and 1978; Best American Short Stories Award, 1977; National Book Award for Fiction, 1979. His war memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973), was named Outstanding Book of 1973 by the New York Times.

 

Mary Gaitskill is the author of the Collection, Because They Wanted To, which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1998 and the novels, Bad Behavior (1988), Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991) and Veronica (2005). Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993), and The O. Henry Prize Stories (1998). Her story Secretary was the basis for the film of the same name. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she teaches creative writing at Syracuse University. She lives in New York.

 

Robert Stone is the author of seven novels: A Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers (a National Book Award winner), A Flag For Sunrise, Children of Light, Outerbridge Reach, Damascus Gate and Bay of Souls. He has also published a story collection, Bear and His Daughter. His most recent is the memoir Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties. Stone was born in Brooklyn in 1937, attended Catholic schools but did not graduate from high school and enlisted in the US Navy in 1955. After the Navy he lived in New York for a couple of years and in 1962 won a Stegner fellowship to the creative writing program at Stanford University. He currently lives in New York City.