Courtney Angela Brkic’s Stillness and Other Stories was published this year by Farrar Straus & Giroux, who will publish The Stone Fields, a work of nonfiction, next year. Her stories and poems have appeared in Zoetrope, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Indiana Review, Third Coast, The Atlanta Review, The South Carolina Review, Folio and others. She has also translated A.B. Simic’s poetry. Ms. Brkic worked for the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague and for Physicians for Human Rights in Bosnia-Herzogovenia in the 1990s and her fiction draws on those experiences. She is a graduate of The College of William and Mary and received a Master of Fine Arts from New York University. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship at the University of Zagreb to research women in the war-affected populations there. She lives in Gambier, Ohio where she teaches at Kenyon College.

Alexander Chee is the author of Edinburgh (Picador, 2002), which was awarded Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, a James Michener/Copernicus Society Fellowship Prize, the Asian American Writers Workshop Literary Award and the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize. His work has appeared in Interview, Big, Out and has been anthologized in several collections including The Man I Might Become, Loss Within Loss, Boys Like Us, His 3 and Men on Men 2000. Born in Rhode Island and raised in Guam, Korea and Maine, he is a graduate of Wesleyan University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is now a Visiting Writer at Wesleyan. He lives in New York City.

A former president of the Kansas Audubon Council, Christopher Cokinos drew on his knowledge of the natural world to write Hope is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds. Published by Tarcher/Putnam in 2000, it chronicles the decline and extinction of the Carolina Parakeet, the Labrador Duck, the Great Auk, the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, the Heath Hen, and Passenger Pigeon. Mr. Cokinos is an assistant professor of English at Utah State University at Logan and is at work on another book of nonfiction about meteorites and the people who become obsessed with them. He is a recipient of a Lila Wallace/Readers’ Digest Fund Fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society and has published a book of poems, Killing Seasons (Woodley Press, 2003).

Trudy Dittmar was born and raised in rural New Jersey. She has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago and Columbia University. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Orion, The Georgia Review and North American Review and has been anthologized in collections including American Nature Writing 2000, The Norton Book of Nature Writing and Pushcart Prize XXI. In 2000, she was a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. This fall the University of Iowa Press will publish her first book, Fauna and Flora, Earth and Sky, a collection of her new work along with selected previously published essays. Ms. Dittmar divides her time between her cabin in northwestern Wyoming and the family farm in New Jersey where she grew up.

Major Jackson’s Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia Press) received the Cave Canem Poetry Prize in 2000 for the best first book by an African American poet, and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Callaloo and The New Yorker, among other journals. Formerly the Literary Arts curator of the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia, he has had fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Pew Fellowship in the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as a commission from The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia. He is a graduate of Temple University and University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program. Mr. Jackson is an assistant professor of English at University of Vermont, a member of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina, and a Witter Bynner Fellow for the Library of Congress. He lives in South Burlington, Vermont.

Agymah Kamau is the author of two novels. Flickering Shadows (Coffee House Press, 1996), was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, a Quality Paperback Club’s New Voices Award and cited by Library Journal as one of the top 20 first novels of 1996. Pictures of a Dying Man (Coffee House Press, 1999) won the Commonwealth of Virginia/Library of Virginia Award, Foreword magazine’s Book of the Year Award, and was among the Village Voice’s best 25 books of that year. Born in Barbados and living in the U.S. since 1977, Mr. Kamau had a first career as an economist. With an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, he now teaches at the University of Oklahoma and lives in Norman.

Ann Pancake’s Given Ground, published by the University Press of New England, won the Bakeless Literary Publication Prize of the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference in 2000. These stories originally appeared in Shenandoah, The Virginia Quarterly, and Glimmer Train, among other magazines. She grew up in Romney, West Virginia, graduated summa cum laude from West Virginia University, and received an M.A. from the University of North Carolina and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington. Some of her awards include an NEA grant, a Pennsylvania Council of the Arts Grant, first place in the New Millennium Writing Awards for creative nonfiction, and most recently, the Glasgow Prize for Given Ground. In 2002, she left her teaching position at Penn State Erie to return to West Virginia and complete a novel set there. Just this October, she moved to Seattle.

All of the stories in Lewis Robinson’s first collection, Officer Friendly (HarperCollins, 2003), take place in Maine. These stories have appeared in several magazines including Open City, Tin House and the Missouri Review, and one was read at Selected Shorts in New York City this year. Born in Natick, Massachusetts, Mr. Robinson grew up in Maine, attended Middlebury College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a teaching/writing fellow and was awarded the Glenn Shaeffer Award. He has written for Sports Illustrated and the Boston Globe, and has worked as a fire warden and a crab slaughterer. He lives in Portland, Maine.

Jess Row’s stories have been published in Ploughshares, Harvard Review and Threepenny Review, among others. Two of his stories have been selected in separate years for Best American Short Stories (chosen respectively by Barbara Kingsolver and Walter Moseley) and one of those stories, "The Secrets of Bats," was also included that same year in The Pushcart Prize XXVI. His work has now been collected in The Train to Lo Wu, which will be published next year by Dial Press. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan MFA program and is at work on a novel set in Laos. Mr. Row lives in New York City and is an assistant professor of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

Sarah Ruhl’s play Eurydice had its premier at Madison Repertory Theater this fall. Late: A Cowboy Song was included in the New Works Now! Festival at the Joseph Papp Public Theater and has had a production at the Ohio Theater in New York, produced by Clubbed Thumb. Recent projects also include Passion Play (Actor’s Centre, London), Orlando (The Actor’s Gang in Los Angeles), Melancholy Play (Piven Theater Workshop in Chicago), and Virtual Meditation #1 (Actor’s Theater of Louisville, Humana Festival). Ruhl received a B.A. in English and an M.F.A. in playwriting at Brown University where she had a Lucille Lortell Fellowship. She was the recipient of a Helen Merrill award, and was a Kennedy Center Fellow at Sundance Theatre Laboratory in 2000. She is originally from Chicago.