SHORT FICTION

Dorothy Allison is the best-selling author of Bastard out of Carolina, Cavedweller, and a memoir, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure.  She is the author of Trash, a collection of short stories; The Women Who Hate Me, a collection of poetry; and Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature, a collection of essays. She Who, a novel, is forthcoming from Penguin in the winter of 2009.

Lan Samantha Chang is the author of a collection of short fiction, Hunger, and a novel, Inheritance. Hunger won the Southern Review Award and a California Book Award, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award.  Inheritance won the 2004 PEN Beyond Margins Award for the Novel. Samantha is the recipient of fellowships from Stanford University, Princeton University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa, where she is Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Ron Hansen was born and raised in Nebraska and educated at Creighton University, the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop, and at Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellow.  He is the author of six novels, including The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (1983) and Mariette in Ecstasy (1991). He has also published a children's book, The Shadowmaker (1987), a book of stories, Nebraska (1989), and the collection of essays, A Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith and Fiction (2001); and he has edited two short story anthologies, You Don’t Know What Love Is (1987) and You’ve Got to Read This: Contemporary American Writers Introduce Stories That Held Them in Awe (1994). In May, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published his biographical novel, Exiles, on the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and the shipwreck of the Deutschland. In 1995 he earned an M.A. in Spirituality at Santa Clara University, where he is now the Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. Professor in the Arts and Humanities.

Jim Shepard is the author of six novels, including most recently Project X, and three story collections, including most recently Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which was nominated for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize.  His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Granta, the New Yorker and Playboy.  He teaches at Williams College.

NOVEL WRITING

Walter Kirn is a novelist, essayist, and book critic who lives in Livingston, Montana. His works of fiction include My Hard Bargain (stories), Thumbsucker (the basis of the 2003 movie) and Up in the Air (currently being developed for the screen by director Jason Reitman). Kirn's serial novel, The Unbinding, was composed on the Internet for Slate Magazine in 2006 and published in paper form in 2007. He contributes essays to such periodicals as “The Atlantic” and “The New York Times Magazine” and is a regular reviewer for “The New York Times Sunday Book Review.”

MEMOIR

Ann Hood is the author of nine books, including the novel The Knitting Circle and the memoir Do Not Go Gentle: My Search for Miracles in a Cynical Time. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in publications such as The Paris Review, Tin House, and O Magazine. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island. 

David Shields is the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times bestseller The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (which was published by Knopf in 2008 and reissued in paperback by Vintage in 2009), Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (which is forthcoming from Knopf next year), Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (winner of the PEN Revson Award), and Dead Languages: A Novel (winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award). He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. His essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Yale Review, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney's, and Believer.

POETRY

Marie Howe is the author of three volumes of poetry, The Good Thief (1998), and What the Living Do (1997), and Kingdom Of Ordinary Time and the co-editor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1994). Stanley Kunitz selected Howe for a Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets. She has, in addition, been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review, among others. Currently, Howe teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia, and New York University.

D. A. Powell's most recent book is Chronic (Graywolf, 2009). His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies, and he is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, Boston Review, the James Michener Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Powell has taught at the University of Iowa's Iowa Writers' Workshop, New England College, and Columbia University. For three years, he was the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry at Harvard University. He is currently on the faculty of the English Department at University of San Francisco.

Kevin Young is the author of six books of poetry. His most recent collection, For the Confederate Dead, won the Quill Award in Poetry and the Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement. His book Dear Darkness is forthcoming. 

GUESTS

Stephen Elliott is the author of seven books including the novel Happy Baby and the forthcoming memoir The Adderall Diaries. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, GQ, Best Sex Writing, Best American Erotica, and twice in Best American Non-Required Reading.