Fiction

Myla Goldberg is the author of the bestselling Bee Season, a New York Times Notable Book for 2000 and winner of the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, among other awards. She is also the author of the essay collection Time’s Magpie and the novel Wickett’s Remedy. Her short stories have appeared in McSweeneys and Harpers, and her book reviews have appeared in The New York Times and Bookforum.

Brian Morton is the author of four novels: The Dylanist, Starting Out in the Evening, A Window Across the River, and, most recently, Breakable You. He was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Koret Jewish Book Award for Fiction, and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Poetry

Stuart Dischell is the author of Good Hope Road, a 1991 National Poetry Series Selection; Evenings & Avenue; Dig Safe; and Backwards Days. Dischell’s poems have been widely published in journals such as The Atlantic, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review, as well as in numerous anthologies. A recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, he teaches in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at Greensboro and in the Low Residency M.F.A. Program at Warren Wilson College.

Stephen Dobyns is the author of more than 30 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including a recent book of poems Mystery, So Long. His book Cemetery Nights won the Poetry Society of America’s 1987 Melville Cane Award. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. He recently published his first collection of short stories, Eating Naked: Stories, including two stories that appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1995 and 1999.

Thomas Lux is the author of 10 books, including New and Selected Poems (1975-1995), The Street of Clocks, The Cradle Place, and, most recently, God Particles. The recipient of numerous awards, he is Poet-in-Residence at Sarah Lawrence College and Bourne Professor of Poetry at Georgia Tech.

Patricia Smith continues to enjoy national and international acclaim. Her latest work, Teahouse of the Almighty, was a National Poetry Series winner and was voted Best Poetry Book of 2006 on About.com, among other awards. Her new book, Blood Dazzler, will be published by Coffee House in 2008. She is also the author of Close to Death, Big Towns, Big Talk, and Life According to Motown. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, and other journals, as well as numerous anthologies, including The Spoken Word Revolution and The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry. She is also a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, and she appeared on the award-winning HBO series “Def Poetry Jam.” In October of 2006, she was inducted into the International Literary Hall of Fame for
Writers of African Descent.

Nonfiction

Nicholas Dawidoff is the author of three books. The Fly Swatter was a Pulitzer Prize finalist; In the Country of Country was named one of the greatest all-time works of travel literature by Conde Nast Travelle, and The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg was a critically acclaimed national bestseller. He is also editor of the Library of America’s Baseball: A Literary Anthology and contributes to The New Yorker, The American Scholar, and The New York Times Magazine. A Guggenheim,
Civitella Ranieri, and Berlin Prize fellow, he is currently The Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University.

Jo Ann Beard received nonfiction fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2005, and a Whiting Award in 1997 for her collection of autobiographical essays The Boys of My Youth. Her work has appeared in various journals, magazines, and anthologies including Tin House, The New Yorker, and Best American Essays.