Ron Carlson is the author of eight books of fiction, most recently his selected stories A Kind of Flying (W.W. Norton 2003), the novel The Speed of Light (HarperCollins 2003), and the story collection At the Jim Bridger (Picador paperback 2003). His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Harper's, The New Yorker, Gentlemen's Quarterly, Epoch, The North American Review, and other journals, as well as The Best American Short Stories, The O'Henry Prize Series, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and dozens of other anthologies. He is Foundation Professor and Regents' Professor of English at Arizona State University. Among his awards are a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, the Cohen Prize at Ploughshares, and a National Society of Arts and Letters Literature Award.

 

Charles Baxter is the author of Saul and Patsy, published in September, 2003 by Pantheon. His previous novel, The Feast of Love (Vintage), was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has published two other novels, First Light and Shadow Play, and four books of stories including Harmony of the World and most recently Believers. He has also published essays
on fiction collected in Burning Down the House, and has edited or co-edited three books of essays, The Business of Memory, published by Graywolf, Bringing the Devil to His Knees (The University of Michigan Press), and A William Maxwell Portrait, to be published by W. W. Norton. He also edited Best New American Voices 2001 (Harcourt). He has received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Prix St. Valentine in France, and the Catalan Booksellers’ Association Award for book of the year in Spain. He was born in Minneapolis in 1947, graduated from Macalester College with a B. A. in 1969, and the State University of New York at Buffalo with a Ph.D. in 1974, and lived for many years in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he taught at the University of Michigan. He now lives in Minneapolis and is currently the Edelstein-Keller Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper’s.

You can visit Charles Baxter's website by clicking here.

C.D. Wright earned a BA from Memphis State College (now the University of Memphis) in 1971 and an MFA from the University of Arkansas in 1976. In 1979, she took a position at the San Francisco State University Poetry Center. She has published literary maps of both Rhode Island and Arkansas. Her first and second books, Room Rented by a Single Woman and Terrorism: Poems, were published by Frank Stanford's Lost Roads Publishers. Wright and her husband, Forrest Gander, began running Lost Roads after Stanford's death in 1981. Wright's later work includes String Light; Deepstep Come Shining, a book-length poem; and One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, a collaboration with photographer Deborah Luster. She has won several prestigious awards, including her appointment to the post of poet laureate of the state of Rhode Island in 1994, a Guggenheim fellowship, and, in 2004, a MacArthur Fellowship.

Forrest Gander was born in Barstow, in the Mojave Desert, in 1956. He is the editor of Mouth to Mouth (Milkweed Editions) a bilingual anthology of contemporary Mexican poets, and the author of four books, most recent of which is Science & Steepleflower from New Directions. His other titles include Rush to the Lake (Alice James Books); Lynchburg (University of Pittsburgh Press); and Deeds of Utmost Kindness (Wesleyan University Press). He has been the recipient of two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative North American Writing and a Whiting Award for Writers. His critical essays appear in The Nation, The Boston Review, and The Providence Journal, among other places. Together with C.D. Wright, he co-edits the literary book press Lost Roads Publishers and keeps a small orchard outside Providence. He teaches at Harvard University.

 

Eleanor Wilner is the author of several poetry collections, including Sarah’s Choice, and most recently, Reversing the Spell: New and Selected Poems. Wilner has won many awards including the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the Jupiter Prize. She has also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts. Wilner’s poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker and the Norton Anthology of Poetry.

Wilner is on the faculty of the MFA Writing Program at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, and lives in Philadelphia.

 

Percival Everett is the author of fourteen novels and three collections of short fiction. Among his novels are Glyph, Erasure, American Desert, For Her Dark Skin, Zulus, The Weather and The Women Treat Me Fair, Cutting Lisa, Walk Me to the Distance, Suder, The One That Got Away, Watershed, God's Country, and a story collection, Big Picture. He is the recipient of the Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature (for his 1996 story collection Big Picture) and a New American Writing Award (for his 1990 novel Zulus). His stories have been included in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and Best American Short Stories. He has served as a judge for, among others, the 1997 National Book Award for fiction and the PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1991. He teaches fiction writing, American Studies and critical theory and he has taught at Bennington College, The University of Wyoming and the University of California at Riverside. He is currently at the University of Southern California.

 

Carole Maso is the author of nine books. Five novels: Ghost Dance, The Art Lover, AVA, The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, and Defiance. Also: Aureole, a book of short fictions; Break Every Rule, essays about writing and the creative process; The Room Lit by Roses: A Journal of Pregnancy and Birth; and, Beauty is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo. Maso has been the recipient of many awards, including an NEA Individual Fellowship, a NYFA Fellowship, and a Lannan Fellowship, and she is on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at Brown University.

 

Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing and came to the United States in 1996. She has an MFA from Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. Her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Glimmer Train, Prospect, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, and California Book Award for first fiction. She lives in Oakland, California with her husband and their two sons, and teaches in the MFA program at Mills College.

 

Catherine Barnett won the 2003 Beatrice Hawley Award for her first collection of poems, Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, which was published by Alice James Books in May 2004. Her honors include a 2004 Whiting Writers Award, the 2004 Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and a 2005 Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Barrow Street, Shenandoah, Interim, The Hat, and The Washington Post. She teaches creative writing at NYU and lives in New York City.

 

Charles D'Ambrosio grew up in Seattle, Washington. His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and in numerous anthologies, including Best American Short Stories. His work has received a number of prizes including a James Michener Fellowship and the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. His book of stories, The Point, was published in 1995 by Little Brown. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop.

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Richard Ford is the author of A Piece of My Heart (1976) and The Ultimate Good Luck (1981). Ford took a job writing for Inside Sports magazine. When the magazine was sold, he decided to write a book about a sportswriter; the resulting novel, published in 1986, received widespread acclaim: it was named one of five best books of 1986 by Time magazine. The Sportswriter was followed by Rock Springs (1987), a highly praised book of short stories, and in 1990 by a novel set in Great Falls, Montana, called Wildlife. His most recent novel, Independence Day, won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. His latest books are Women and Men and A Multitude of Sins. He is widely considered to be among the most distinguished living American writers.

• Reading at Texas State's Alkek Library

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Mary Powell's second novel, Galveston Rose, is the fiction selection from TCU Press for Spring 2005. The novel traces the final big adventure of opinionated and independent Rose Parrish who at the age of seventy-six sets out to open the most exciting restaurant and night club that Galveston has ever seen. Powell's rich descriptions of island life, the sometimes-raging weather, and the island's uniquely spirited past vividly bring Galveston to life as a character all its own.

The author's other publications include Auslander, a story of three generations of a German family in central Texas (TCU Press, 2000), and Queen of the Air (Coldwater Press, 1995), a biography of Katherine Stinson for young readers .

You can visit John Dufresne's website by clicking here.

Aimee Bender lives in Los Angeles. Some of her stories have appeared in Granta, GQ, Story, Harper's, The Antioch Review, Vestal Review. Her books include Willful Creatures (Doubleday, 2005) , An Invisible Sign of My Own (Anchor/Doubleday, 2001), andThe Girl in the Flammable Skirt (Anchor/ Doubleday, 1999). She also contributed to The Secret Society of Demolition Writers (Random House, 2005).

You can visit her website by clicking here.

Darlen Unrue is the author of Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist.

Click the links to check out some reviews of Darlene Unrue's work by
The Austin Chronicle and The New York Times.

Gerald Stern is the recipient of many awards, including the National Book Award, the Lamont Prize, a Guggenheim, three NEA awards, a fellowship from The Academy of Arts and Letters and the Ruth Lilly Prize. He taught at many universities, including Columbia University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Pittsburgh; until his retirement in 1995, he taught at the Writer's Workshop in Iowa City. He now lives in Lambertville, New Jersey. He is the author of What I Can't Bear Losing: Notes from a Life.

Anne Marie Macari’s first book of poems, Ivory Candle, won the APR/Honickman first book prize in 2000. Her poems have been published in many magazines and anthologies such as TriQuarterly, American Poetry Review, Bloomsbury Review, Shenandoah, Five Points, and The Iowa Review. She is on the core faculty at New England College Low residency MFA Program and the Prague Summer Workshops. Her second book, Gloryland, has been called by the poet-critic Tony Hoagland, a book “in pursuit of the serious mysteries . . . a sensational collection.”

Marjorie Perloff is Sadie D. Patek Professor Emerita of Humanities at Stanford University. She is currently Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she taught before going to Stanford in 1987. In 2006, she will be President of the Modern Language Association.

She is the author of twelve books and a few hundred essays and reviews on twentieth century poetry and poetics--both Modern and Postmodern--as well as on poetry and the visual arts. Her first three books were on individual poets--Yeats, Lowell, and Frank O'Hara; she then shifted to questions of poetics in The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981) and The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition (1985). The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde and the Language of Rupture (1986) takes up an alternate Modernism and its influence today; this book was republished with a new Introduction in 2004. Of her later books, perhaps the most important are Radical Artifice: Writing in the Age of Media and Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary. She has recently published a cultural memoir, The Vienna Paradox and a collection of new essays Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy.

Click the highlighted links for a biography of and interview with Adam Zagajewski.

In 1983, Barry Hannah published The Tennis Handsome and returned to the University of Mississippi as Writer-in-residence, a position he still holds today. Since returning to Ole Miss, he has continued to publish novels and short story collections to rave reviews, including Captain Maximus (1985), Hey Jack! (1987), Boomerang (1989), Never Die (1991), and Bats Out of Hell (1993). Recently, Hannah has published the short story collection High Lonesome (1996) which has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.

Heather McHugh was born to Canadian parents in San Diego, California, in 1948. She was raised in Virginia and educated at Harvard University. Her books of poetry include Eyeshot (Wesleyan University Press, 2003); Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993 (1994), which won both the Boston Book Review's Bingham Poetry Prize and the Pollack-Harvard Review Prize, was a Finalist for the National Book Award, and was named a "Notable Book of the Year" by the New York Times Book Review; Shades (1988); To the Quick (1987); A World of Difference (1981); and Dangers (1977).

She is also the author of Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (1993), and two books of translation: Because the Sea is Black: Poems of Blaga Dimitrova (with Niko Boris, 1989) and D'après tout: Poems by Jean Follain (1981).

Her honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. In 1999 she was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Heather McHugh teaches as a core faculty member in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and as Milliman Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Dao Strom was born in Saigon, Vietnam and grew up in northern California. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and has been the recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship, a James Michener Fellowship, and the Nelson Algren Award, among several others. Her first novel, GRASS ROOF, TIN ROOF, was published by Houghton Mifflin/Mariner Books in 2003. She is currently at work on her second book of fiction.

For more information, check out Dao's website.