Julia Alvarez is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. She spent her early childhood in the Dominican Republic, emigrating to this country and language at the age of ten. In 1991, she published How the Garc’a Girls Lost Their Accents, which was selected a Notable Book by the New York Times and an American Library [Association] Notable Book, 1992. Her second novel, In the Time of the Butterflies was a finalist for the National Book Critics' Award in fiction in 1995.  She is also the author of two other novels, ÁYO! (1997) and In the Name of Salomé (2000); a collection of essays, Something to Declare (1999); four books of poetry: The Housekeeping Book, The Other Side/El Otro Lado, Homecoming: New and Collected, and Seven Trees; and two books for young readers: The Secret Footprints (2000) and How Tia Lola Came to Visit Stay (2001).  She is a writer in residence at Middlebury College. 

Chloe Bland is an M.F.A. student in fiction at Bennington College. She lives in Stony Creek, Connecticut.

Julianna Baggott is the author of the national bestseller Girl Talk (2001), as well as The Miss America Family (April 2002), and a book of poems, This Country of Mothers (2001). Her work has appeared in dozens of publications, including Poetry, Best American Poetry 2000, and Ms. Magazine.

Jenny Browne works as a poet-in-the-schools and freelance journalist in San Antonio, Texas. She has recent poems published and forthcoming in the Marlboro Review, Kalliope, The Seneca Review, and Many Mountains Moving.  Her first collection, Glass, was published by Pecan Grove Press in 2001.

Steven Church was born and raised in Lawrence, Kansas. His hometown was not destroyed by a nuclear attack in 1983, but the TV movie "The Day After" was filmed there. He graduated from the University of Kansas with a B.A. in philosophy and has just recently finished an M.F.A. in fiction at Colorado State University. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with wife, Rachel, and their son, Malcolm. His work has been published in River Teeth and is forthcoming from Puerto Del Sol, Quarterly West, and Quarter After Eight.

Kenneth Cook teaches creative writing and literature and is chair of the Arts & Letters Program at Prescott College in Arizona.  His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been published in numerous journals, including Witness, Shenandoah, Threepenny Review, American Short Fiction, Alligator Juniper, and Harvard Review.  His awards include an Arizona Commission on the Arts fellowship, two Pushcart Prize nominations, and residency fellowships to The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Blue Mountain Center.  He is currently finishing a cycle of stories and a novel, in which the characters in "Easter Weekend" figure prominently.

Brian Komei Dempster's poems have appeared in The Asian Pacific American  Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, and Quarterly West. He is the editor of From Our Side of the Fence:  Growing Up in America's Concentration Camps (Kearny Street Workshop, 2001).

Paul Eberly recently finished an M.F.A. in fiction at the Bennington Writing Seminars.  He lives in Chicago and Albuquerque and in the air between the two.  His stories have appeared in Standards and Conceptions Southwest.

Chris Elam is Editor-in-chief of ArtKrush, the art magazine online.

Janet Fitch is the author of White Oleander. Her short fiction has appeared in such journals as Black Warrior Review, Room of One's Own, and Venice West Review. A resident of Los Angeles, she was the 2001 Moseley Fellow at Pomona College, and taught at Squaw Valley Community of Writers in August 2002.

Katie Ford's poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, and Partisan Review, among other literary journals. She currently studies poetry and teaches creative writing at The University of Iowa. Her first book, Deposition, will be published by Graywolf Press in fall 2002.

Sarah Fox lives in Minneapolis, where she is a Bush Artist's Fellow, a teacher of poetry and creative writing, and the editor of Fuori Editions.  She is a regular contributor to Rain Taxi Review of Books, and her poems have appeared in many magazines such as Verse, Conduit, Spout, Luna, Spinning Jenny, and others.  Her first book, Assembly of the Shades, is forthcoming in fall 2002 from Salmon Publishing in County Clare, Ireland.

Barry Gifford's novels have been translated into twenty-two languages.  His book Night People was awarded the Premio Brancati in Italy, and he has been the recipient of awards from PEN, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Library Association, and the Writers Guild.  David Lynch's film, Wild at Heart, based on Gifford's novel,  won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990, and Barry Gifford's novel Perdita Durango was made into a feature film in 1997.  Gifford co-wrote with director David Lynch the film Lost Highway, also released in 1997. His most recent books include The Phantom Father: A Memoir (named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year); Wyoming, a novel (named a Best Novel of the Year by the Los Angeles Times), which has been adapted for the stage and film; and American Falls: The Collected Short Stories (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002). Barry Gifford can be found at www.barrygifford.com

Elizabeth Graver is the author of a story collection, Have You Seen Me?, and two novels, Unravelling and The Honey Thief. Her stories have been included in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. She teaches at Boston College.

John Griesemer is the author of the novel No One Thinks of Greenland. Also an actor, he's worked on Broadway, Off-Broadway, in TV and feature films. His fiction has appeared in magazines including Boulevard, Gettysburg Review, and Threepenny Review.

John Wesley Harding, Gentleman Musician, is just about to release his ninth album and finish his first novel. His real name is Wesley Stace.

Claire Hero is a graduate of the Writing Program at Washington University. Her work has appeared in Boston Review, Willow Springs, and Pool.

Edward Hoagland is the author of African Calliope, The Courage of Turtles, Red Wolves and Black Bears, Tugman's Passage, and Walking the Dead Diamond River.  He lives in Vermont.

Takahiro Kimura was born in 1965 in Tokyo, Japan, where he currently lives and works as an artist and illustrator. His work has been published and exhibited widely in Japanese and international venues. He began creating artwork inspired by the human face in 1992, a subject that has most recently been explored in the Broken 1000 Faces series, begun in 1999.

Justin Lane is a photographer in New York City. His pictures from September 11 were among those awarded ­the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography.

Norman Lock has written for the American and German stage, German radio, and for film.  A recipient of the Aga Kahn Prize from The Paris Review, he also writes short fiction.

Robert Lopez lives in New York, where he teaches at the New School. His fiction has appeared in BOMB, New Orleans Review, The Chattahoochee Review, and  American Letters & Commentary and is forthcoming in Neotrope  and Confrontation.

Michael Moon teaches American literature and queer theory at Johns Hopkins.  He is the author of A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol (Duke, 1998) and Disseminating Whitman (Harvard, 1991).

Stewart O'Nan's faster novels are Snow Angels, The Speed Queen, and A Prayer for the Dying. The slow ones, which he likes better, are The Names of the Dead, A World Away and Everyday People. His latest, Wish You Were Here, is really slow. He promises the next one will be quicker.

Tim Parrish is the author of Red Stick Men, a collection of stories set in and near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He was nominated by Tim O'Brien for Best New American Voices 2002. He teaches at Southern Connecticut State University.

Tom Perrotta is a screenwriter and the author of the collection Bad Haircut and the novels Election (made into the acclaimed 1999 movie), The Wishbones and, most recently, the national bestseller, Joe College.

Nelly Reifler's stories have been published by (or are forthcoming in) magazines, including the Florida Review, BOMB, Mississippi Mud, Exquisite Corpse and Art on Paper; you can also see Nelly's work at failbetter.com and exquisitecorpse.org; Pressed Wafer printed an excerpt of her novel-in-progress as a broadside; and she is one of the writers included in the anthology of post-9/11 literature 110 Stories (NYU Press). Last winter, Nelly curated "What Happened in Lime Mills?," an exhibition based loosely on some of her writing, at the Rotunda Gallery.  For several years, she co-edited the microzine Aceldama with her husband, artist Josh Dorman.  Nelly has won U.A.S. Explorations and Henfield Prizes. Her collection, See Through, will be published by Simon and Schuster in 2003. 

Lauren Sandler lives in Brooklyn.  A former NPR producer and fellow of NYU's Cultural Reporting and Criticism program, she writes about American media and culture for The Nation, Salon, The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, Newsday, and The New Republic, among other publications.

Elizabeth Scanlon is associate editor of The American Poetry Review and a 2002 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellow. She lives in Philadelphia.

Ashley Shelby recently received an M.F.A. in nonfiction writing from Columbia University. She is most recently published in Gastronomica: the journal of food and culture, Small Spiral Notebook, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, and Carve Magazine and has work forthcoming in Watchword Literary Magazine and Transit (U.K.). She lives in New York.

Mary Sullivan is the Coordinator for PEN New England.  She spent the last year in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, where she and her husband read the Bible out loud.  She is the author of the novel, Stay.