FICTION

Daniel Alarcón

Daniel Alarcón’s debut story collection, War by Candlelight, was a finalist for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway Award, and his debut novel, Lost City Radio, won the International Literature Award in 2007. He has received a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and has been named by Granta magazine one of the best American novelists under thirty-five. He is the associate editor of Etiqueta Negra, an award-winning monthly magazine published in his native Lima, Peru. A visiting artist at the California College of the Arts and a visiting scholar at the Center for Latin American Studies at UC Berkeley, he is a graduate from the MFA program at the University of Iowa.

Lan Samantha Chang

Lan Samantha Chang’s second novel, All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, was published in 2010. Alan Cheuse, reviewing for NPR, calls it an unforgettable novel that “begins small, but blossoms into a full and resonant story of the pains and perils, falsehoods and truths of trying to be an American artist, in this case poet, against all odds, psychological and social.” Chang is also the author of Inheritance and Hunger: A Novella and Stories, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and The Best American Short Stories. Chang is the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and the recipient of fellowships from Princeton University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett is the author of the short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here, a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award (2002), and the novel Union Atlantic (2010). Adam has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His work has appeared in Esquire, the Financial Times, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, Zoetrope All-Story, Best American Short Stories, The O’Henry Prize Stories, and National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts. In 2006, he won the PEN/Malamud Award for accomplishment in short fiction and has also won the PEN/Winship Award. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Yale Law School, Adam has been a visiting professor at the Writers’ Workshop and Columbia University and a Visiting Artist at the California College of the Arts. He lives in New York City.

Michelle Huneven

Michelle Huneven is the author of three novels: Blame (2009) was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, while Jamesland (2003) was a New York Times notable book and a BookSense pick, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize, and a winner of the Southern California Booksellers Award for Fiction. Her first novel, Round Rock (1997), was also a New York Times notable book, one of the Los Angeles Times’ best hundred books of the year, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award. Her short stories have been published in Harpers and Redbook. She received a Whiting Award for Fiction in 2002. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Michelle Huneven has taught at the University of Southern California, UC Santa Barbara and in the Antioch MFA program.

POETRY

Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield is the author of six collections of poetry, including After (which was shortlisted for England’s T.S. Eliot Prize and also chosen as one of the best books of 2006 by both the Washington Post and the London Financial Times); Given Sugar, Given Salt (finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award), The Lives of the Heart, and The October Palace, as well as a book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. She also edited and co-translated The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Komachi & Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan, Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, and Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems. Her other honors include The Poetry Center Book Award; fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets; Columbia University’s Translation Center Award; and the Commonwealth Club of California’s Poetry Medal. In 2004, she was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by the Academy of American Poets.

Major Jackson

Major Jackson is the author of three collections of poetry: Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006) and Leaving Saturn (2002), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Hoops was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literature: Poetry. Jackson is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He serves as the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review.

D.A. Powell

D. A. Powell’s books include Cocktails (Graywolf, 2004) and Chronic (Graywolf, 2009), both finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. Powell’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the James Michener Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, the California Book Award, and the Kingsley-Tufts Prize. A former Briggs-Copland Lecturer at Harvard University, Powell has taught at Columbia University, the University of Iowa and New England College. He is currently the McGee Visiting Writer at Davidson College in North Carolina.

David St. John

David St. John is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently The Face: A Novella in Verse. Other collections include Prism, The Red Leaves of Night, In the Pines: Lost Poems 1972-1997, and Study for the World’s Body: New and Selected Poems, a finalist for the National Book Award. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, both the Rome Fellowship in Literature and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the O. B. Hardison Jr. Prize from The Folger Shakespeare Library, and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. He is Professor of English at the University of Southern California.