Sherwin Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation and is Dine of the Todich'ii'nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl'izilani (Many Goats Clan). Currently, he lives in Tucson, AZ. His first collection of poems, Shapeshift, was published in 2003 by the University of Arizona Press, and he is writing a book length poem entitled Flood Song. He holds an A.F.A. from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program and is completing his studies at the University of Arizona. He also works for literacy programs that bring poets and writers into public schools where there are Native American student populations. Mr. Bitsui is a recipient of an Individual Poet Grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, a Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship, and more recently, a Lannan Foundation Literary Residency Fellowship. Mr. Bitsui has published his poems in American Poet, The Iowa Review, Frank (Paris), Lit Magazine, and elsewhere. His poems were also anthologized in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century.

Charles D'Ambrosio has written two collections of short stories, The Point: And Other Stories (Little, Brown, 1995), and The Dead Fish Museum (Knopf, 2006), and a collection of essays, Orphans (Clear Cut Press, 2005). Several of his stories appeared in The New Yorker, and one, "The High Divide," won the O. Henry Prize in 2005. Other stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Zoetrope All-Story, Best American Short Stories and A Public Space. A recipient of an NEA grant, he has also garnered a Pushcart Prize, the Aga Khan Fiction Prize, the Henfield/TransAtlantic Review Award, a James Michener Fellowship and has been a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the National Magazine Award. Mr. D'Ambrosio grew up in Seattle and now lives in Portland, Oregon. He has a B.A. from Oberlin College, was a Humanities Fellow at the University of Chicago, and graduated from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1991, where he has been a visiting faculty member. Currently, Mr. D'Ambrosio is the William Kittredge Visiting Writer at the University of Montana in Missoula.

Actor and Playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis is a member of New York City's LAByrinth Theater Company. His plays, which have been produced on five continents and throughout the United States, include: The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, Our Lady of 121st Street, Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train, and In Arabia, We'd All Be Kings. These four plays were originally produced by LAByrinth, and directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman. His new play, The Little Flower of East Orange, premieres at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 2007. Mr. Guirgis has received a PEN/Laura Pels award, a Theatre Communications Group fellowship, and has been named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by FILMAKER MAGAZINE. Born in New York, he attended Albany State University and lives in New York City.

Tyehimba Jess's first book, leadbelly, is a collection of lyric poems which tell the biography of bluesman Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter. The book, published by Verse Press in 2005, was a winner of the National Poetry Series. Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the "Best Poetry Books of 2005." Mr. Jess has had a Literature Fellowship from the NEA and was a fellow at Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center. He has won the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Award, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry and has twice been a member of the Chicago Green Mill Slam team. He has also won Chicago's Sister Cities Poetry contest, and served as Chicago's Poetry Ambassador to Accra, Ghana. He has a B.A. in Public Policy from University of Chicago, an M.F.A. in Poetry from New York University and is a proud Cave Canem alumnus. Tyehimba Jess currently teaches in the English Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Suji Kwock Kim's first book, Notes from the Divided Country: Poems (LSU Press, 2003), won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, The Nation/ Discovery Award, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Paris Review, Slate, The New Republic and on National Public Radio, and have been translated into Korean, Japanese, Spanish, German and Arabic. Private Property, a multimedia play Ms. Kim co-wrote, was produced at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and featured on BBC-TV. She received a B.A. from Yale University, an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a Fulbright Scholarship from Seoul National and Yonsei Universities, and a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Korea Foundation, and Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She lives in New York City.

The stories in Yiyun Li's first book, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, (Random House, 2005) are set in China and among Chinese-Americans living in America. The book won the International Frank O'Connor Short Story Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and a Californian Book Award for first fiction. Ms. Li grew up in Beijing, a few minutes bike ride from Tiananmen Square, and attended Peking University, where she was conscripted into the Chinese Army. She came to the United States in 1996 to study medicine and started writing two years later. After receiving her master's degree in immunology from the University of Iowa, she attended the Iowa Writers Workshop where she received an MFA. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She lives in Oakland, California with her husband and their two sons, and teaches at Mills College.

Micheline Aharonian Marcom was born in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, to an American father and an Armenian-Lebanese mother, and raised in Los Angeles. As a child, she spent summers in Beirut with her mother's family. Her first novel, Three Apples Fell from Heaven, (Riverhead, 2001) is set in Turkey between 1915-1917 and depicts the Ottoman government's genocide of the Armenian population. It was named one of the best books of the year by both The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, and was a New York Times Notable Book. Her second book, The Daydreaming Boy, published by Riverhead in 2004, won the PEN/USA Award in fiction and was named a best book by the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. The novel's central figure is a haunted middle-aged survivor of the Armenian massacres, tormented by his memories, living in 1960's Beirut. The third book in the trilogy, Draining the Sea, forthcoming from Riverhead Books, is set partly in Los Angeles, and partly in the Highlands of Guatemala during its civil war. Ms. Marcom received a Lannan Literary Fellowship in 2004 and is currently a Visiting Writer at Mills College in Oakland, California.

Nina Marie Martínez was born in San José, California. A second-generation Mexican American, she is a high-school dropout and single mother, with a Bachelors degree from the University of California at Santa Cruz. While at UCSC, she subsidized her student aid package by buying and selling "junk", mostly vintage clothing. Her first novel, ¡Caramba! A Tale Told in Turns of the Card, was published by Knopf in 2004, and by Anchor in paperback in 2005. A Spanish edition has just been released by Vintage Español in a translation by Liliana Valenzuela. Ms. Martínez is at work on her second novel about a young girl who overcomes a turbulent childhood to become the queen of the flea market. Her new book will be published by Knopf in early 2008. She lives in Santa Cruz.

Playwright Bruce Norris grew up in Houston, Texas, and as a child performed at the Alley Theatre. He briefly studied scenic design at Brown University and graduated from Northwestern as a theatre major. A well regarded actor, he has appeared in many plays in Chicago and On and Off-Broadway: Biloxi Blues and What the Butler Saw; and in films such as The Sixth Sense and A Civil Action. John Guare wrote his play, Chaucer in Rome, for Bruce Norris. He maintains a close association with Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where five of his works have been both commissioned and produced, including The Infidel (also produced at the Philadelphia Theatre Company), Purple Heart, (which went on to the Galway Festival in Ireland), We All Went Down to Amsterdam, The Unmentionables, and The Pain and the Itch. This last play, a dark comedy, had its New York debut this fall at Playwrights Horizons. A long-time resident of Chicago, Mr. Norris now lives in Brooklyn.

Born on a dairy farm in Ireland on the Limerick-Tipperary border, Patrick O'Keeffe first came to the United States in 1986, where he lived in Boston working in restaurants and in construction. Returning to the U.S., he moved to Kentucky, where he enrolled at Lexington Community College. He graduated from the University of Kentucky with a BA in English and went on to the MFA program at the University of Michigan. In 2000, his story "Looby's Hill" was published in Doubletake magazine, and he began working on three other novellas that comprise his collection, The Hill Road, which was published by Viking in 2005. The book is set in the fictional parish of Kilroan, in southwestern Ireland. It was a Barnes and Noble Discover book, and this past winter, it received the Story Prize. Mr. O'Keeffe lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and is a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Michigan, where he also tutors in the writing center.