Brian Turner is the author of two poetry collections, Phantom Noise and Here, Bullet, which won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award, the 2006 Pen Center USA Award, and the 2007 Poets Prize. His memoir is My Life as a Foreign Country. Turner served in the US Army for seven years, including one year as an infantry team leader in Iraq. His poetry appeared in Voices in Wartime, and he was featured in Operation Homecoming, a documentary of firsthand accounts of American servicemen and women. In 2009 Turner won a United States Artists Fellowship.

Kim Barnes's first memoir, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, received the PEN/Jerard Fund Award, and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. Her second memoir, Hungry for the World, was a Borders Books New Voices Selection. She is the author of three novels: Finding Caruso; A Country Called Home, winner of the 2009 PEN Center USA Award in Fiction; and In the Kingdom of Men. A former Idaho-Writer-in-Residence, she now teaches in the Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing program at the University of Idaho.

Ben Fountain's story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, won the 2007 PEN/Hemingway Award and a Whiting Award. His novel, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, a finalist for the National Book Award, won the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Los Angeles Times Book Award. Currently he is the University Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University.

Carolyn Forché is the author of four poetry collections. Her first, Gathering The Tribes, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. In 1977 she received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, which enabled her to travel to El Salvador, where she worked as a human rights advocate. Her second collection, The Country Between Us, received the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Her third collection, The Angel of History, won The Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her fourth collection is Blue Hour. She edited the landmark anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, in which 140 poets bear witness to war, torture, exile, and repression. Currently she is writing a memoir about her times in El Salvador, Lebanon, South Africa, and France.

Phillip Lopate is the author of four essay collections, Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body, and Portrait Inside My Head; two novels; three poetry collections; a memoir; and To Show and Tell: the Craft of Literary Nonfiction. He edited the most important essay anthology of our time, The Art of the Personal Essay. He directs the program in nonfiction writing at Columbia University.

Heather Christle is the author of three poetry collections: What is Amazing, The Difficult Farm, and The Trees The Trees, which won the 2012 Believer Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in the Boston Review, Gulf Coast, The New Yorker, and The Best American Poetry. She has taught poetry at Antioch College, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Emory University, where she was the 2009-2011 Poetry Writing Fellow. She is the Web Editor for jubilat and frequently a writer in residence at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. A native of Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, she lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Amy Hempel's The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel won the 2007 Ambassador Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Hempel won the 2008 Rea Award, and the 2009 PEN/MALAMUD Award for the Short Story. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, and the United States Artists Foundation. Her stories have appeared in Harper’s, GQ, The Best American Short Stories, and The Pushcart Prize. Hempel has taught writing at Bennington, Sarah Lawrence, Princeton, Duke, Columbia, and now teaches writing at Harvard. She lives in New York City.

Kim Addonizio has been called “one of our nation’s most provocative and edgy poets.” Her latest books are Lucifer at the Starlite, a finalist for the Poets Prize and the Northern CA Book Award, and Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within. She has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, and Pushcart Prizes for both poetry and the essay. Her collection Tell Me was a National Book Award Finalist. Other books include the novels Little Beauties and My Dreams Out in the Street, and a story collection, The Palace of Illusions. Addonizio offers private poetry workshops in Oakland, NYC, and online, and often incorporates her love of blues harmonica into her readings.

Adam Johnson is Associate Professor of English at Stanford University. His work has appeared in Esquire, Harper's, Playboy, GQ, Paris Review, Granta, Tin House, The New York Times and Best American Short Stories. He is the author of Emporium, a story collection, and Parasites Like Us, a novel. Johnson has received a Whiting Writers Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. His fiction has been translated into twenty-three languages. His novel The Orphan Master's Son won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize.

Elizabeth Crook is the author of four novels: The Raven’s Bride, Promised Lands, The Night Journal, and Monday, Monday. She has written for Texas Monthly and served on the council of the Texas Institute of Letters. The Raven’s Bride was the 2006 Texas Reads: One Book One Texas selection. The Night Journal won the 2007 Spur award for Best Long Novel of the West and the 2007 Willa Literary Award for Historical Fiction.