FACULTY & STAFF

Nancy Gerbault is the Founding Director of Abroad Writers' Conference and a Literary Agent with Nancy Gerbault Literary Agency. Over the years, I have worked with many talented writers. I love books and I have a deep respect for authors who write them. As an agent, I feel a tremendous responsibility to help my clients, from reading and editing their manuscripts, to sending them to the right editors. I help writers shape their careers. I began my career in the travel industry as a TWA Flight Attendant. While I worked I attended UC Berkeley and received my degree in Art, History of Art and Anthropology. I had numerous Art Exhibitions including a solo show at the Crocker Museum of Art, in Sacramento. I was created an International Art Project ENWIND brought worldwide respect and the project was endorsed by The Minister of Culture of France, Jack Lang and Renown Archaeologist, Richard E. Leakey in Kenya. Later, I received my MA in Anthropology at CSUS, where I focused on hunter/gatherer societies, specializing in prehistoric rock art. I began holding international writing workshops and conferences in 2003. Since that time, I have held events in numerous countries and I've introduced participants to authors some would not have access too.

Tavis Kammet holds a MA in Theatre from University of London, Goldsmith College.

Chris Abani's prose includes Song For Night (Akashic, 2007), The Virgin of Flames (Penguin, 2007), Becoming Abigail (Akashic, 2006), GraceLand (FSG, 2004), and Masters of the Board (Delta, 1985). His poetry collections are Hands Washing Water (Copper Canyon, 2006), Dog Woman (Red Hen, 2004), Daphne's Lot (Red Hen, 2003), and Kalakuta Republic (Saqi, 2001). He is a Professor at the University of California, Riverside and the recipient of the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN Beyond the Margins Award & the PEN Hemingway Book Prize.

Kazim Ali is is the author of two books of poetry, The Far Mosque (Alice James Books), winner of Alice James Books' New England/New York Award, and The Fortieth Day (BOA Editions, 2008). He is also the author of the novel Quinn’s Passage (blazeVox books), named one of "The Best Books of 2005" by Chronogram magazine. He is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College and teaches in the low-residency MFA program of the University of Southern Maine. His work has been featured in many national journals such as Best American Poetry 2007, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Barrow Street, jubilat and Massachusetts Review. He is one of the founding editors of Nightboat Books.

Dorothy Allison was Awarded the 2007 Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction, Allison is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. The Women Who Hate Me, was published with Long Haul Press in 1983. Her short story collection, Trash (1988). Trash won two Lambda Literary Awards and the American Library Association Prize for Lesbian and Gay Writing. Allison received mainstream recognition with her novel Bastard Out of Carolina, (1992) a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award. The novel won the Ferro Grumley prize, an ALA Award for Lesbian and Gay Writing, became a best seller, and an award-winning movie. It has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Cavedweller (1998) became a national bestseller, NY Times Notable book of the year, finalist for the Lillian Smith prize, and an ALA prize winner. Adapted for the stage by Kate Moira Ryan, the play was directed by Michael Greif, and featured music by Hedwig composer, Stephen Trask. In 2003, Lisa Cholendenko directed a movie version featuring Krya Sedwick. The expanded edition of Trash (2002) included the prize winning short story, "Compassion" selected for both Best American Short Stories 2003 and Best New Stories from the South 2003.

He earned a master's degree in English with a thesis on the poetry of Dylan Thomas (Dylan Thomas' Obscurity: The Legitimacy of Explication, University of Georgia, 1968). Locus Award for Best Novella [The Samurai and the Willows] of 1977 from the readers of Locus. Nebula Award for Best Novelette [The Quickening] of 1981 from the Science Fiction Writers of America. Nebula Award for Best Novel [No Enemy But Time] of 1982 from the Science Fiction Writers of America. Locus Award for Best Novella [Her Habiline Husband] of 1983 from the readers of Locus. Science Fiction Chronicle Award for Best Novella [Her Habiline Husband] of 1983 from the readers of Science Fiction Chronicle. Locus Award for Best Anthology [Light Years and Dark] of 1984 from the readers of Locus. The Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Best Novel [Unicorn Mountain] of 1988 from the Mythopoeic Society. Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel [Brittle Innings] of 1994 from the readers of Locus. Science Fiction Chronicle Award for Best Novel [Brittle Innings] of 1994 from the readers of Science Fiction Chronicle. The Southeastern Science Fiction Achievement Award for Best Short Fiction [The Door Gunner] of 2003

Author of two novels, two collections of short stories, and a nominee for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and numerous anthologies here and abroad. She has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, among many other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award. Her latest novel, Away, is an epic story about a Russian immigrant. She lives in Connecticut and teaches at Yale University.

Robert Olen Butler won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for A GOOD SCENT FROM A STRANGE MOUNTAIN. He has published ten novels-THE ALLEYS OF EDEN, SUN DOGS, COUNTRYMEN OF BONES, ON DISTANT GROUND, WABASH, THE DEUCE, THEY WHISPER, THE DEEP GREEN SEA, MR. SPACEMAN, and FAIR WARNING-and three volumes of short fiction-TABLOID DREAMS, HAD A GOOD TIME, and A GOOD SCENT… His book of prose poems, SEVERANCE, debuted with RIVAGES in France in 2005, to coincide with a ballet based upon it that was performed in Lyon. Also in 2005 he published a volume of his lectures on the creative process, FROM WHERE YOU DREAM, edited with an introduction by Janet Burroway. A recipient of both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant, he also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2001 he won a National Magazine Award in Fiction. His stories have appeared widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Zoetrope, The Paris Review, The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and The Sewanee Review. They have also been chosen for inclusion in four annual editions of The Best American Short Stories, eight annual editions of New Stories from the South, and numerous college literature textbooks .

Dan Chaon (born 1964) is an American author. His best-selling first novel was You Remind Me of Me (2004). His short-story collections Fitting Ends (1996) and Among the Missing (2001) were both well-received; the latter was a finalist for a National Book Award, and was also named one of the year's ten best books by the American Library Association and The New York Times. Chaon's short stories have also won the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award, and have been included in the Best American Short Stories of 1996 and 2003. He was awarded the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Billy Collins was born in New York City in 1941. He is the author of several books of poetry, including Ballistics (2008), She Was Just Seventeen (2006), The Trouble with Poetry (2005); Nine Horses (2002); Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001); Picnic, Lightning (1998); The Art of Drowning (1995), which was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Questions About Angels (1991), which was selected by Edward Hirsch for the National Poetry Series; The Apple That Astonished Paris (1988); Video Poems (1980); and Pokerface (1977). His work has been featured in the Pushcart Prize anthology and has been chosen several times for the annual Best American Poetry series. Collins has edited Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry (Random House, 2003), an anthology of contemporary poems for use in schools and was a guest editor for the 2006 edition of The Best American Poetry. About Collins, the poet Stephen Dunn has said, "We seem to always know where we are in a Billy Collins poem, but not necessarily where he is going. I love to arrive with him at his arrivals. He doesn't hide things from us, as I think lesser poets do. He allows us to overhear, clearly, what he himself has discovered." In 2001, Collins was named U.S. Poet Laureate. His other honors and awards include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1992, he was chosen by the New York Public Library to serve as "Literary Lion". He has conducted summer poetry workshops in Ireland at University College Galway, and taught at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, and Lehman College, City University of New York. He lives in Somers, New York.

William Dalrymple was born in Scotland and brought up on the shores of the Firth of Forth. He wrote the highly acclaimed bestseller In Xanadu when he was twenty-two. The book won the 1990 Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award and a Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award; it was also shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. In 2002 he was awarded the Mungo Park Medal by the Royal Scottish Geographical Society for his ‘outstanding contribution to travel literature’. He wrote and presented the television series Stones of the Raj and Indian Journeys, which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA in 2002. His Radio 4 series on the history of British spirituality and mysticism, The Long Search, won the 2002 Sandford St Martin Prize for Religious Broadcasting and was described by the judges as ‘thrilling in its brilliance... near perfect radio’. In December 2005 his article on the madrasas of Pakistan was awarded the prize for Best Print Article of the Year at the 2005 FPA Media Awards. June 2006 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters honoris causa from the University of St Andrews “for his services to literature and international relations, to broadcasting and understanding”. In 2007, The Last Moghal won the prestigous Duff Cooper Prize for History and Biography. In November 2007, William received an Honourary Doctorate of Letters, Honoris Causa, from the University of Lucknow University “for his outstanding contribution in literature and history”, and in March 2008 won the James Todd Memorial Prize from the Maharana of Udaipur.

Junot Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and is the author of Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao which won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, Best American Short Stories (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000), in Pushcart Prize XXII and in The O'Henry Prize Stories 2009. He has received a Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, the 2002 Pen/Malamud Award, the 2003 US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the fiction editor at the Boston Review and the Rudge (1948) and Nancy Allen professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mark Doty's Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. His eight books of poems include School of the Arts, Source, and My Alexandria. He has also published four volumes of nonfiction prose: Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Heaven's Coast, Firebird and Dog Years, which was a New York Times bestseller in 2007. Doty’s poems have appeared in many magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, The London Review of Books, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The New Yorker. Widely anthologized, his poems appear in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and many other collections. Doty's work has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, two Lambda Literary Awards and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. He is the only American poet to have received the T.S. Eliot Prize in the U.K., and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill and Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. Doty lives in New York City and in Houston, Texas, where he is John and Rebecca Moores Professor in the graduate program at the University of Houston. In the fall of 2009, he will join the faculty at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

She is a former Chairman of the National Book League (1980-82), and was awarded the CBE in 1980. She received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1973, and holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Sheffield (1976), Manchester (1987), Keele (1988), Bradford (1988), Hull (1992), East Anglia (1994) and York (1995). Her novels include, The Garrick Year (1964), set in the theatre world; The Millstone (1965), winner of the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, in which a young academic becomes pregnant after a casual relationship; Jerusalem the Golden (1967), winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction), about a young woman from the north of England at university in London; The Waterfall (1969), a formally experimental narrative; The Needle's Eye (1972), winner of the Yorkshire Post Book Award (Finest Fiction), the story of a young heiress who gives away her inheritance; and The Realms of Gold (1975), about a prominent archaeologist juggling the different aspects of her life. The Ice Age (1977) examines the social and economic plight of England in the mid-1970s while in The Middle Ground (1980) a journalist is forced to take-stock of her life.

Mexican writer and author. Born on September 30, 1950, in Mexico City, Mexico. Esquivel began writing while working as a kindergarten teacher. She wrote plays for her students and then went on to write children's television programs during the 1970s and 1980s. Esquivel often explores the relationship between men and women in Mexico in her work. She is best known for Like Water for Chocolate (1990), an imaginative and compelling combination of novel and cookbook. It had been released in Mexico a year earlier. After the release of the film version in 1992, Like Water for Chocolate became internationally known and loved. The book has sold more than 4.5 million copies. Esquivel has continued to show her creative flair and lyrical style in her later work. Accompanied by a collection of music, her second novel The Law of Love (1996) combined romance and science fiction. Between the Fires (2000) featured essays on life, love, and food. Her most recent novel, Malinche (2006), explores the life of a near mythic figure in Mexican history-the woman who served as Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés's interpreter and mistress.

Karen Joy Fowler is the author of four earlier novels and two short story collections. The Jane Austen Book Club spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fowler’s previous novel, Sister Noon, was a finalist for the 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Her debut novel, Sarah Canary, was a New York Times Notable Book, as was her second novel, The Sweetheart Season. In addition, Sarah Canary won the Commonwealth medal for best first novel by a Californian, and was short-listed for the Irish Times International Fiction Prize as well as the Bay Area Book Reviewers Prize. Fowler’s short story collection Black Glass won the World Fantasy Award in 1999. Fowler and her husband, who have two grown children, live in Davis and Santa Cruz, California.

Margaret George is an American historian and historical novelist, writing historical biographies. She was born in Nashville, Tennessee. She lives with her husband in Madison, Wisconsin. She is the author of the bestselling novels The Autobiography of Henry VIII, Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles and The Memoirs of Cleopatra. The latter novel was adapted into a successful TV-movie starring Leonor Varela in the title role, Billy Zane as Mark Antony and Timothy Dalton as Julius Caesar. George is currently working on a novel about the life of Queen Elizabeth I during the later years of her reign, in the time of Shakespeare and the discovery of the New World, to be published in 2010. After the publication of her Elizabeth novel, George plans on writing a novel about Boudicca, highlighting Boudicca's conflict with Rome and Nero.

After leaving Oxford, Sarah Gristwood began work as a journalist, writing at first about the theatre as well as general features on everything from gun control to Giorgio Armani. But increasingly she found herself specialising in film interviews - Johnny Depp and Robert De Niro; Martin Scorsese and Paul McCartney. She has appeared in most of the UK's leading newspapers - The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph (Daily and Sunday) - and magazines from Cosmopolitan to Country Living and Sight and Sound to The New Statesman. Turning to history she wrote two bestselling Tudor biographies, Arbella: England’s Lost Queen and Elizabeth and Leicester; and the eighteenth century story Perdita: Royal Mistress, Writer, Romantic which was selected as Radio 4 Book of the Week. Presenting and contributing to several radio and tv documentaries, she also published a book on iconic dresses, Fabulous Frocks (with Jane Eastoe); and a 50th anniversary companion to the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, as well as collaborating with Tracy Borman, Alison Weir and Kate Williams on The Ring and the Crown (Hutchinson), a book on the history of royal weddings. 2011 also saw the publication of her first historical novel, The Girl in the Mirror (HarperCollins). In September 2012 she is bringing out a new non-fiction book - Blood Sisters: the hidden story of the women behind the Wars of the Roses (HarperCollins). Sarah and her husband, the film critic Derek Malcolm, live in London and Kent.

Hamilton lives in Rochester, Wisconsin. She grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, the youngest of five children. She graduated from Carleton College in 1979 as an English major. Her first published works were short stories, "My Own Earth" and "Aunt Marj's Happy Ending", both published in Harper's Magazine in 1983. "Aunt Marj's Happy Ending" later appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1984. Her first novel, The Book of Ruth, was published in 1988 and won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, and the Wisconsin Library Association Banta Book Award in 1989. The Book of Ruth was an Oprah's Book Club selection in 1996, and it was the basis for a 2004 television film of the same title. In 1994, she published A Map of the World, which was adapted for a film in 1999 and, the same year, was also an Oprah's Book Club selection. Her third novel, The Short History of a Prince, published in 1998, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998.This book was also shortlisted for the 1999 Orange Prize.In 2000, Hamilton was named a Notable Wisconsin Author by the Wisconsin Library Association

Paul Harding (born 1967) is an American musician and author, best known for his debut novel Tinkers (2009) which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2010 PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers. Harding was drummer in the band Cold Water Flat throughout its existence from 1990 to 1996. Harding has a B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has taught writing at Harvard University and the University of Iowa. Harding grew up on the north shore of Boston in the town of Wenham, Massachusetts. As a youth he spent a lot of time "knocking about in the woods" which he attributes to his love of nature. His grandfather fixed clocks and he apprenticed under him, an experience that found its way into his novel Tinkers. After graduating from UMass, he spent time touring with his band Cold Water Flat in the US and Europe. He had always been a heavy reader and recalls reading Carlos Fuentes' Terra Nostra and thinking "this is what I want to do". In that book Harding "saw the entire world, all of history". When he next had time off from touring with the band he signed up for a summer writing class at Skidmore College in New York. His teacher was Marilynne Robinson and through her he learned about the Iowa Writers' Workshop writing program and applied and was accepted.[5] There he studied with Barry Unsworth, Elizabeth McCracken and later Robinson. At some point he realized some of the people he admired most were "profoundly religious" and so he spent years reading theology, and was "deeply" influenced by Karl Barth and John Calvin. He considers himself a "self-taught modern New England transcendentalist". Musically, he admires jazz drummers and considers Coltrane's drummer, Elvin Jones, the greatest. Harding lives near Boston with his wife and two sons. Harding's second novel will concern characters from his first novel Tinkers, looking at the lives of George Crosby's daughter, Kate Crosby, and his grandson Charlie. It will be published by Random House.

Edward Humes is one of United States premier journalists. A journalist and author of eight works of nonfiction, Humes received the Pulitzer Prize for his newspaper coverage of the military and a PEN Center USA Award for his groundbreaking book about the children of juvenile court, “No Matter How Loud I Shout.” His other books include “School of Dreams,” “Baby E.R.,” “Mean Justice” (a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 1999) and the bestseller “Mississippi Mud.” He has written for numerous magazines and newspapers and is now a writer-at-large for Los Angeles magazine.

Eric William Ives, OBE is a British historian and an expert on the Tudor period. He is Emeritus Professor of English History at the University of Birmingham. In 2001 he was awarded the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in recognition of his services to history. Ives is particularly noted for his work on the life of Anne Boleyn, the second wife and queen of King Henry VIII of England. His theories on her life have drawn him into fierce debate with the American historian Retha Warnicke, who wrote The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn in 1989 to challenge Ives's findings. He began researching Anne Boleyn about 1979, publishing the results in 1986. The biography, Anne Boleyn, was modified and expanded for re-publication in 2004 under the new title of The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn. In 2009, he published a study of Lady Jane Grey and the circumstances of her accession and downfall. He has also written extensively on the History of Law, and the development of modern higher education. His biographical writing on Tudor courtiers covers the Welsh land-owning magnate William Brereton, who was unjustly condemned to death in 1536 on the false charge of being Anne Boleyn's lover. In 2000 the University of Birmingham Press published The First Civic University: Birmingham, 1880-1980 - An Introductory History, which he co-authored with Diane K. Drummond and Leonard Schwarz.

Poet Hettie Jones was born Hettie Cohen in Brooklyn, New York, in 1934. She earned a BA in Drama from the University of Virginia and did postgraduate work at Columbia University. Her first collection of poems, Drive (Hanging Loose Press, 1997), was selected by Naomi Shihab Nye to receive the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is also the author of How I Became Hettie Jones (1990), a memoir of the beat scene of the fifties and sixties, as well as of her marriage (1958-1966) to LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka; Big Star Fallin' Mama: Five Women in Black Music (1974); and several books for children. Her fiction, poems, and prose have appeared in Essence, Frontier: A Journal of Women Studies, Hanging Loose, Heresies, IKON, Ploughshares, Village Voice Literary Supplement, the Washington Post, and other periodicals. With LeRoi Jones she established Yugen (1957-1963), a magazine that published poetry and writings by William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Philip Whalen, and others. She also launched Totem Press, which published poets such as Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Frank O'Hara, Edward Dorn, and Gary Snyder. She is currently involved with PEN American Center's Prison Writing committee and runs a writing workshop at the New York State Correctional Facility for Women at Bedford Hills. Hettie Jones lives in New York City, where she writes and teaches.

Russell Celyn Jones is a novelist and critic, a Booker Prize Judge (2002), John Llewellyn Rhys Prize judge (1998) and is a staff reviewer for The Times. His novels are: TEN SECONDS FROM THE SUN, published by Little,Brown (2006), Surface Tension, Little, Brown (2001), The Eros Hunter, Little, Brown (1998), An Interference of Light, Viking Penguin (1995), Small Times, Viking Penguin (1992), Soldiers and Innocents, Jonathan Cape (1990) and Little, Brown (1998). His short fiction has been anthologised in Summer Magic, Bloomsbury (2003), Time Out Book of London Short Stories, Penguin (2000), The Ex-Files, Quartet (1998), Time Out Book of New York Stories, Penguin (1997). Non-fiction: “Standards in Creative Writing Teaching”, The Creative Writing Coursebook, Macmillan (2001), “Dylan Thomas’s Wales”, The Atlas of Literature, Ed. Malcolm Bradbury, De Agostini (1996). He has been awarded the Society of Author’s Award (1997), Welsh Arts Council Fiction Prize (1991), David Higham Prize (1990).

Anne Le Claire is a graduate of the MacDuffie School in Springfield, Massachusetts and continued her education at North Adams College, North Adams, Massachusetts and Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. In 1983, pursuing a long-held dream and encouraged by the fiction editor of Yankee, Anne quit her journalism jobs and began a novel, 'Land’s End', which was published by Bantam Books in 1985. She has since written seven other novels, including the critically acclaimed 'Entering Normal' and 'Leaving Eden'. Her work has been published in many countries including Great Britain, Italy, Greece, France, Germany, Portugal, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Slovakia, Netherlands, Brazil and Israel. Her essays have been included in a number of anthologies, among them I’ve Always Meant to Tell You, Letters to Our Mothers: An Anthology of Contemporary Women Writers; From Daughters and Sons to Fathers: What I’ve Never Said; and A Sense of Place: An Anthology of Cape WomenWriters

Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing, China and moved to the United States in 1996. She received an MFA from Iowa Writers' Workshop and an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. Her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review,and elsewhere. She has received a Whiting Writers' Award and was awarded a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, TX. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, Guardian First Book Award, and California Book Award for first fiction. She was recently selected as one of Granta's 21 Best of Young American Novelists. She lives in Oakland, California with her husband and their two sons, and teaches at University of California, Davis.

Recognized for his dual achievements as both a scientist and as a writer, Alan Lightman is one of a select group of scholars whose professional work has successfully bridged the gap between the worlds of art and science. As one of America's foremost interpreters of science, Lightman, a Professor in the Writing and Humanistic Studies Program at MIT, focuses on the intersection of the arts and sciences by exploring the many ways good writing informs and strengthens both worlds. Prof. Lightman has been highly recognized for his academic writings by the American Physical Society and the American Association for the advancement of Science and in turn was elected a fellow of both organizations in 1989. What makes Alan Lightman most remarkable is that these accomplishments in the scientific realm have been matched by equal success in the world of arts and literature. He is the author of a dozen books, some of which have been translated into thirty languages, including The Diagnosis, Good Benito, Einstein's Dreams, and Dance for Two. Einstein's Dreams, an international best seller, was runner up for the 1994 PEN New England/Winship Award and was the March 1998 selection for National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation" book club. Einstein's Dreams is one of the most widely used books on college campuses today and has been selected for "Common Book" programs at a dozen major universities. The Diagnosis has received wide critical acclaim, was voted one of the 10 best novels of the year by Booksense (independent booksellers), has been a Barnes and Noble national college bestseller, and was a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award in fiction. Lightman received his undergraduate degree from Princeton and his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology. From 1976 to 1989, he taught astronomy and physics at Harvard University where he received international recognition for his research in astrophysics and had a number of articles published in the leading journals of physics.

Colum McCann is the author of two collections of short stories and four novels, including "This Side of Brightness","Dancer" and “Zoli,” all of which were international best-sellers. In 2009 McCann was awarded the National Book Award for "Let the Great World Spin His fiction has been published in 26 languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Paris Review and other places. He has written for numerous publications including The Irish Times, Die Zeit, La Republicca, Paris Match, The New York Times, the Guardian and the Independent. In 2003 Colum was named Esquire magazine's "Writer of the Year." Other awards and honors include a Pushcart Prize, the Rooney Prize, the Irish Independent Hughes and Hughes/Sunday Independent Novel of the Year 2003, and the 2002 Ireland Fund of Monaco Princess Grace Memorial Literary Award. He was recently inducted into the Hennessy Hall of Fame for Irish Literature. His short film "Everything in this Country Must," directed by Gary McKendry, was nominated for an Academy Award Oscar in 2005.

JACQUELYN MITCHARD -- Orange Prize finalist, Best Selling Author and Editor-in-Chief of Merit Press Jacquelyn Mitchard has written nine novels for adults, including several New York Times bestsellers and several that have enjoyed critical acclaim, recently winning Great Britain's People Are Talking prize and, in 2002, named to the short list for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. She has written seven novels for Young Adults as well, and five children's books, a memoir, Mother Less Child and a collection of essays, The Rest of Us: Dispatches from the Mother Ship. Her essays also have been published in newspapers and magazines worldwide, widely anthologized, and incorporated into school curricula. Her reportage on educational issues facing American Indian children won the Hampton and Maggie Awards for Public Service Journalism. Mitchard's work as part of Shadow Show, the anthology of short stories honoring her mentor, Ray Bradbury, currently is nominated for the Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, and Audie Awards. She served on the Fiction jury for the 2003 National Book Awards, and her first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, was the inaugural selection of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club, later adapted for a feature film by Michelle Pfeiffer. Mitchard is the editor in chief and co-creator of Merit Press, a new realistic YA Fiction imprint. A Chicago native, Mitchard grew up the daughter of a plumber and a hardware store clerk who met as rodeo riders. A member of the Lac du Flambeau Chippewa tribe, she is a Distinguished Fellow at the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois. Mitchard taught Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction at Fairfield University and was the first Faculty Fellow at Southern New Hampshire University. Her upcoming YA novel, What We Lost in the Dark, will be published in January by Soho Teen. She lives on Cape Cod with her husband and their nine children.

Professor Andrew Motion was born in London on 26 October 1952, and read English at University College, Oxford. He taught English at the University of Hull (1976-81) where he met the poet Philip Larkin. He was editor of Poetry Review (1981-83) and was Poetry Editor and Editorial Director at London publishers Chatto & Windus (1983-89). He succeeded Malcolm Bradbury as Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has been Chairman of the Arts Council of England's Literature Panel since 1996. An acclaimed poet (and champion of poetry), critic, biographer and lecturer, Andrew Motion became Poet Laureate in 1999, succeeding Ted Hughes. He was awarded the Newdigate Prize at Oxford for his poem 'Inland', included in his first collection of poems, The Pleasure Steamers, published in 1977. His poetry collections include Independence (1981); Secret Narratives (1983); Dangerous Play: Poems 1974-1984 (1984), which won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; Natural Causes (1987), which won the Dylan Thomas Award; The Price of Everything (1994); Salt Water (1997) and Selected Poems 1976-1997 (1998).

Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka on 12 September 1943. He moved to England in 1954, and in 1962 moved to Canada where he has lived ever since. He was educated at the University of Toronto and Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and began teaching at York University in Toronto in 1971. He published a volume of memoir, entitled Running in the Family, in 1983. His collections of poetry include The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems (1981), which won the Canadian Governor General's Award in 1971; The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems (1989); and Handwriting: Poems (1998). His first novel, Coming Through Slaughter (1976), is a fictional portrait of jazz musician Buddy Bolden. The English Patient (1992), set in Italy at the end of the Second World War, was joint winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction and was made into an Academy Award-winning film in 1996. Anil's Ghost (2000), set in Sri Lanka, tells the story of a young female anthropologist investigating war crimes for an international human rights group .

Sally Potter started making experimental short films when she was a teenager. She then trained as a dancer and choreographer at the London School of Contemporary Dance, before founding her own company, The Limited Dance Company (with Jacky Lansley). During the same period Sally made several short dance films, including Combines, for The London Contemporary Dance Theatre. Sally went on to become an award-winning performance artist and theatre director with a reputation for work that managed to be both challenging and entertaining. For the theatre, Sally created solo shows as well as large-scale theatrical performances for outdoor locations including, Mounting, Death and the Maiden and Berlin all collaborations with Rose English. In addition, she worked in various improvised music bands as a lyricist and singer and collaborated with composer Lindsay Cooper on the song cycle, Oh Moscow which she performed throughout Europe, Russia and North America. She also co-composed with David Motion the soundtrack to ORLANDO, and created the score for THE TANGO LESSON. Sally's short film THRILLER (1979), a critical re-working of Puccini's opera La Bohème, was a hit on the international festival circuit and brought her work to a wider audience. This was followed by her first feature film, THE GOLD DIGGERS (1983), starring Julie Christie; and then a short film, THE LONDON STORY (1986); a documentary series for Channel 4, TEARS, LAUGHTER, FEARS AND RAGE (1986); and her film on women in Soviet cinema, I AM AN OX, I AM A HORSE, I AM A MAN, I AM A WOMAN (1988). The internationally acclaimed ORLANDO (1992), starred Tilda Swinton and was based on Virginia Woolf's classic novel. In addition to two Academy Award nominations, ORLANDO won more than 25 international awards, including the Felix awarded by the European Film Academy for the best Young European Film of 1993. Audiences around the world delighted in its wry humor and its bold look at gender, sexuality and the English class system. After completing ORLANDO, Sally returned to script writing (including the first draft of THE MAN WHO CRIED). In 1997 she wrote and directed THE TANGO LESSON, in which she also performed together with renowned tango dancer, Pablo Veron. Presented at the Venice Film Festival, the film received critical and audience acclaim. THE TANGO LESSON was awarded the Ombú de Oro for Best Film at Mar del Plata Festival, Argentina, the SADAIC Great Award from the Sociedad Argentina de Autores y Compositores de Música, as well as nominations from BAFTA and the US National Board of Review.

Over the past two decades, Richard Powers has established himself as one of our most praised as well as one of our most prolific writers of fiction. In 2006, Richard Powers won a National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Awards: 1985 PEN/Hemingway Special Citation 1989 MacArthur Fellowship 1991 Time Magazine Book of the Year 1993 Finalist, National Book Award 1996 Swanlund Professorship, University of Illinois 1998 Business Week Best Business Books of 1998 1998 Elected Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1999 James Fenimore Cooper Prize, American Society of Historians 1999 Lannan Literary Award 2000 Vursell Award, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters 2000 Elected Fellow, Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois 2001 Corrington Award for Literary Excellence, Centenary College 2001 Author of the Year, Illinois Association of Teachers of English 2003 Pushcart Prize 2003 Dos Passos Prize For Literature, Longwood University 2003 W. H. Smith Literary Award (Great Britain) 2004 Ambassador Book Award 2006 National Book Award for Fiction New York Times Notable Book, 2003, 2000, 1998, 1995, 1991

Michele Roberts is the author of twelve highly acclaimed novels, including The Looking Glass and Daughters of the House which won the WJSmith Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her memoir Paper Houses was BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week in June 2007. She has also published poetry and short stories, most recently collected in Mud-stories of sex and love (2010). She is half-English and half-French, she lives in London and in the Mayenne, France. She is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Michele worked as a librarian for the British Council in Bangkok (1973-4) and was Poetry Editor for Spare Rib (1974) and City Limits magazine (1981-3). She is Chair of the British Council literature advisory panel and is a regular book reviewer and broadcaster. Michele is the author of many novels, including the acclaimed Daughters of the House (1992), the story of Therese and Leonie, French and English cousins of the same age, growing up together in an old Normandy house after the Second World War. It was awarded the WH Smith Literary Award and it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for fiction. Her other novels include the semi-autobiographical A Piece of the Night (1978) and The Visitation (1983); The Wild Girl (1984) and The Book of Mrs Noah (1987), which both rework biblical stories; In the Red Kitchen (1990), a tale of Victorian spirituality; Flesh & Blood (1994); Impossible Saints (1997); Fair Exchange (1999), fictional episodes from the lives of Mary Wollstoncraft and William Wordsworth set at the time of the French revolution; and The Looking Glass (2000), inspired by the life of the French poet Mallarme. Her most recent novel is Delusion (2008) and her book of collective stories Mud-stories of sex and Love (2010)--”Michele Roberts is one of those writers descended perhaps as much from Monet and Debussy as Virginia Woolf or Keats... To read a book by her is to savour colour, sound, taste, texture and touch as never before” London Times. Michele was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999 and she was awarded the Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France) in 2000.

Joan Silber, was a 2004 National Book Award finalist for her book, "Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories". She also the author of five other books of fiction--The Size of the World (2008), Lucky Us, In My Other Life, In the City, and Household Words, winner of a PEN/Hemingway Award. Her work appears in the current O. Henry Prize Stories and The Pushcart Prize, and in Norton's The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, and other magazines. She's received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Silber lives in New York City and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and has taught in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program. She is currently at work on a novel about travel, and is also writing a book on time in fiction for Graywolf's Craft of Fiction series.

Gail Tsukiyama was born in San Francisco, California to a Chinese mother from Hong Kong and a Japanese father from Hawaii. She attended San Francisco State University where she received both her Bachelor of Arts Degree and a Master of Arts Degree in English with the emphasis in Creative Writing. Most of her college work was focused on poetry, and she was the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Award. A resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, she has been apart-time lecturer in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, as well as a freelance book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle. During 1997 to 1999, she sat as a judge for the Kiriyama Book Prize and is currently Book Review Editor for the online magazine The WaterBridge Review. In September of 2001, she was one of fifty authors chosen by the Library of Congress to participate in the first National Book Festival in Washington D.C. and has been guest speaker at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival and the Sydney Writers’ Festival.

Lily Tuck was born in Paris. In 2004, she won the National Book Award for THE NEWS FROM PARAGUAY. Lily Tuck is the author of three previous novels: Interviewing Matisse or the Woman Who Died Standing Up, The Woman Who Walked on Water, and Siam, or the Woman Who Shot a Man, which was nominated for the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, and are collected in Limbo, or Other Places I Have Lived. She divides her time between Maine and New York City.

Rebecca Walker is a best-selling author, an acclaimed speaker and teacher, and an award-winning visionary and activist in the fields of intergenerational feminism, multi-cultural identity, enlightened masculinity, and transformational human awareness. When she was just twenty-five, Time Magazine named her one of the fifty most influential future leaders of America—an award which has since been followed by many others, including the Women Who Could Be President Award from the League of Women Voters, the Champion of Choice Award from CARAL, and the Women of Distinction Award from the American Association of University Women. Daughter of writer Alice Walker and civil rights lawyer Mel Leventhal, Rebecca has written about her childhood in her memoirs Black White and Jewish, Autobiography of a Shifting Self. In 1994, Time Magazine named her one of the 50 influential American leaders under 40. Rebecca is a popular speaker on campuses and in business settings around the world. She has lectured at more than 300 universities including Harvard, Oberlin, MIT, and Stanford, and addressed dozens of organizations including the the National Council of Teachers of English, The National Women's Studies Association, and the Ministries of Culture and Gender of Estonia, at the first-ever Conference on Masculinity in the Baltics. She's been a consultant for Sony Music, Microsoft and JP Morgan Chase, and has been featured on Charlie Rose and the Oprah Winfrey Show. Rebecca is an alumna of Yale University, and the founder of the Third Wave Foundation. She sits on the boards of Children As They Are, and the environmental organization Save The Bay.

Alison Weir is the biggest-selling female historian in the UK since 1997. She has sold more than 2.3 million books. Alison is the 5th Best Selling historian in the UK. She's been published in the US by Ballantine (Random House) and Grove Weidenfeld/Grove Atlantic, in Canada by McLelland and Stewart and by numerous publisher all over the world. Her books have been translated six languages. Books: Mary Boleyn: "The Great and Infamous Whore'/Mary Boleyn: The Mistress of Kings", "The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn", "Elizabeth the Queen/The Life of Elizabeth I", "The Six Wives of Henry VIII".