 | A Kite in the Wind : Fiction Writers on Their Craft Wilton Barnhardt is the author of the novels Emma Who Saved My Life, Gospel, and Show World; a former Sports Illustrated motor sports reporter; a graduate of Oxford University (with a thesis on late Henry James); and the first director of North Carolina State University's MFA program, where he still teaches. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. Andrea Barrett is the author of the story collections Ship Fever, which received the National Book Award in Fiction, and Servants of the Map, as well as six novels, most recently The Air We Breathe. She coedited, with Peter Turchi, The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work. She teaches at Williams College and lives in western Massachusetts. Charles Baxter is the author of five novels and four story collections, as well as New and Selected Stories (2010). He is also the author of two books of criticism, Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction and The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot. He teaches at the University of Minnesota and lives in Minneapolis. Karen Brennan has written five books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, and she is the recipient of an AWP Award for fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She is a professor at the University of Utah, where she teaches in the graduate creative writing program. Maud Casey is the author of the novels The Shape of Things to Come, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Genealogy, a New York Times Editor's Choice Book; and a collection of stories, Drastic. She is the recipient of the Calvino Prize and a DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Artist Fellowship. She teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Maryland. Lan Samantha Chang is the author of the novels All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, and Inheritance, which won the PEN/Beyond Margins Prize for Fiction. Her story collection, Hunger, was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Award and won the Southern Review Fiction Prize. Chang's stories have appeared in the Atlantic, Ploughshares, and The Best American Short Stories. She has received support from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Princeton University Council on the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa, where she is a professor of creative writing at the University of Iowa and director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Robert Cohen's recent books include the novels Amateur Barbarians and Inspired Sleep and a collection of stories, The Varieties of Romantic Experience. He teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont. Stacey D'Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea, A Seahorse Year, and The Sky Below. She received a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and the 2011 Sovern/Columbia Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. Her essays, features, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, the Boston Review, Bookforum, and Ploughshares. She is an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University. Judy Doenges is the author of a novel, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, and the short story collection What She Left Me, which won the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fiction Prize, a Washington State Governor's Writers Award, and the Ferro-Grumley Award and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Artist Trust. She teaches at Colorado State University. Anthony Doerr is the author of four books, Memory Wall, The Shell Collector, About Grace, and Four Seasons in Rome. His fiction has won three O. Henry Prizes and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. His work has been translated into eleven languages, and he received the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and Princeton's Hodder Fellowship. He lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons. C. J. Hribal is the author of the novels American Beauty and The Company Car, which received the Anne Powers Book Award; and the short fiction collections Matty's Heart and The Clouds in Memphis, which won the AWP Award for Short Fiction. He also edited The Boundaries of Twilight: Czecho-Slovak Writing from the New World. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He teaches at Marquette University. Michael Martone is the author of eight books of fiction, including The Blue Guide to Indiana ; Seeing Eye ; Pensées: The Thoughts of Dan Quayle ; Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler''s List ; Safety Patrol ; and Alive and Dead in Indiana . Michael Martone (2005) gathers fifty fictions in the form of "contributor's notes"; Quarry Books released Double Wide: Collected Fiction of Michael Martone in 2007. Martone co-edited the Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction: Fifty North American Stories Since 1970 and edited two collections of essays about the Midwest for University of Iowa Press. In August 2009, Quarry Books released Not Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fictions from the Flyover , which Martone also edited. Martone teaches at the University of Alabama. Kevin McIlvoy has published four novels and, most recently, the short story collection The Complete History of New Mexico. His short fiction has appeared in Harper's, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, the Missouri Review, and other magazines. For twenty-seven years he taught at New Mexico State University, where he was editor-in-chief and fiction editor of Puerto del Sol. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, teaching community workshops and editing fiction book manuscripts. Alexander Parsons is the author of the novels Leaving Disneyland and In the Shadows of the Sun. He teaches in the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program. Frederick Reiken is the author of the novels The Odd Sea, The Lost Legends of New Jersey, and most recently Day For Night. His short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Glimmer Train, Gulf Coast, the Western Humanities Review, and other publications. He lives in western Massachusetts with his wife and daughter, and he directs the graduate program in writing at Emerson College. Steven Schwartz is the author of the novels Therapy and A Good Doctor's Son and the story collections Lives of the Fathers and To Leningrad in Winter. His short fiction has won the Nelson Algren Award, the Sherwood Anderson Prize, two O. Henry Awards, and the Cohen Award from Ploughshares, and his nonfiction has received the Cleanth Brooks Prize in Nonfiction from the Southern Review. He teaches in the MFA writing program at Colorado State University. Dominic Smith is the author of two novels. The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre was selected for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Program and won the Steven Turner Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters. The Beautiful Miscellaneous was a finalist for the Faulkner Society Novel Prize. His short fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including the Atlantic. Debra Spark is the author of the novels Coconuts for the Saint, The Ghost of Bridgetown, and Good for the Jews, which won the 2009 Michigan Literary Fiction Award, as well as Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing. She is also the editor of the anthology Twenty Under Thirty: Best Stories by America's New Young Writers. The Pretty Girl, a collection of stories about art and deception, will be published in 2012. Megan Staffel's new collection of short fiction is Lessons in Another Language. She is the author of the novels The Notebook of Lost Things and She Wanted Something Else and the story collection A Length of Wire. Her recent stories have been published in Ploughshares, the Northwest Review, the Seattle Review, and the New England Review. Sarah Stone (www.redroom.com/author/sarah-stone) is the author of the novel The True Sources of the Nile and coauthor, with Ron Nyren, of Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Ploughshares, StoryQuarterly, The Future Dictionary of America, The Writer's Chronicle, the Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, Dedicated to the People of Darfur: Writings on Fear, Risk, and Hope, and elsewhere. She teaches in the MFA in Writing and Consciousness Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Peter Turchi is the author of five books, including Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. He coedited, with Charles Baxter, Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life, and, with Andrea Barrett, The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, he teaches at Arizona State University, where he is director of Creative Writing and director of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers from 1993 to 2008. |
