AUTHOR BIOS:
 |
Denis Johnson is the author of eleven books of fiction including Jesus’ Son, Train Dreams, and Tree of Smoke, which won the 2007 National Book Award. In addition, he has published books of verse including The Incognito Lounge, a book of reportage – Seek – and several plays for the stage. He lives in Idaho and California. |
 |
Averill Curdy is the author of Song & Error(Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2013). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Chicago and teaches creative writing at Northwestern University. |
 |
Joy Williams is the author of four novels—the most recent, The Quick and the Dead, was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 2001—and three other collections of stories, as well as Ill Nature, a book of essays that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among her many honors are the Rea Award for the Short Story and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was elected to the Academy in 2008. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Laramie, Wyoming. |
 |
Charles Simic is a poet, essayist and translator whose work has won numerous awards, among them the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, the MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and, simultaneously, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets and appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2007-2008. He was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. His first poems were published in 1959, when he was twenty-one. Since 1967, he has published twenty books of his own poetry, seven books of essays, a memoir, and numerous of books of translations. He is Emeritus Professor at the University of New Hampshire and Distinguished Visiting Poet at New York University. |