Paul Harding is the author of Tinkers, winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. He graduated from the University of Massachusetts and Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was a drummer for the band Cold Water Flat, and has taught writing at Harvard and the University of Iowa. A 2010 Guggenheim fellow and PEN / Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers Award recipient, Harding now lives near Boston with his wife and two sons, and is working on his second novel.
For more information: http://www.tinkerspulitzer.com/
Jaed Muncharoen Coffin is the author of A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants (Da Capo/Perseus), a memoir which chronicles his experience as a Buddhist monk in his mother’s native village in Thailand. His forthcoming book, Roughhouse Friday (Riverhead/Penguin), is about the year he fought as the middleweight champion of a barroom boxing show in Juneau, Alaska. Recently, Jaed served as the 2009 William Sloane Fellow at Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the 2009-10 Wilson Fellow in Creative Writing at Deerfield Academy, and the 2008 Resident Fellow at the Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska. His nonfiction has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, and he is a regular contributor to Down East Magazine. Jaed lives in his hometown of Brunswick, Maine, and teaches at University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA.
Rachel spent her twenties in China as a consultant, writer, and the unlikely star of a nighttime soap opera called “Foreign Babes in Beijing.” Her memoir of those years, Foreign Babes in Beijing, has been published in six countries and is being developed as a television series by HBO. Her novel Repeat After Me, about a young American ESL teacher, a troubled Chinese radical, and their unexpected New York romance, won a Foreward Magazine Book of the Year award. Her third book, the novel Big Girl Small, is just out from FSG. Rachel has a BA in English from Columbia and an MFA in poetry from Boston University.
Born in Indianola, Mississippi, Steve Yarbrough is the author of four previous novels and three collections of stories. A PEN/Faulkner finalist, he has received the Mississippi Authors Award, the California Book Award, the Richard Wright Award, and an award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. He now teaches at Emerson College and lives with his wife in Stoneham, Massachusetts.
Born and raised in County Mayo, Aine Greaney is a writer and editor living on Boston's North Shore. She is the Author of the novel The Big House and the short story collection The Sheep Breeders Dance. In addition, she has written several award-winning short stories and numerous feature articles for the Irish Independent, the Irish Voice, Creative Nonfiction, the Boston Globe, and the Literary Review, among others.
Pamela Greenberg has an M.F.A. from Syracuse University and a Masters in Jewish Studies from Hebrew College. She has received several writing awards, including a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a fellowship at the Writer’s Room of Boston, a University Fellows award at Syracuse, and a residency at the Millay Colony for the Arts. Her work has been published in a number of journals, including The Green Mountains Review, The Missouri Review, and Shankpainter.
Jedediah Berry is the author of a novel, The Manual of Detection, winner of the William L. Crawford Award and the Dashiell Hammett Prize, and a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Ninth Letter, PEN America, Chicago Review, and Fairy Tale Review, and in anthologies including Best New American Voices and Best American Fantasy. He has worked as an editor at Small Beer Press, and has been a resident at Yaddo and the James Merrill House.
Christina Thompson is the editor of 
Rishi Reddi’s debut book of fiction, Karma and Other Stories, won the 2008 L.L. Winship - PEN/New England Award. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories 2005, earned an honorable mention in Pushcart Prize 2004, and been read on National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts series. She has received grants and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and Vermont Studio Center.
Daniel Tobin is the author of five books of poems, Where the World is Made (University Press of New England, 1999), Double Life (Louisiana State University Press, 2004), The Narrows (Four Way Books, 2005), Second Things (Four Way Books, 2008), and Belated Heavens (Four Way Books, 2010). Among his awards are the "The Discovery/The Nation Award," The Robert Penn Warren Award, the Greensboro Review Prize, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a fellowship in poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. The Narrows was a featured book on Poetry Daily, as well as a finalist for the Foreword Magazine Poetry Book Award. His poems have appeared nationally and internationally in such journals as The Nation, The New Republic, The Harvard Review, Poetry, The American Scholar, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, Image, The Times Literary Supplement (England), Stand (England), Agenda (England), Descant (Canada) and Poetry Ireland Review. His critical study, Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, came out to wide praise from the University of Kentucky Press in 1999. Tobin has also edited The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), Light in the Hand: The Selected Poems Lola Ridge (Quale Press, 2007), and (with Pimone Triplett) Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art (University of Michigan Press, 2007). His work has been anthologized in Hammer and Blaze, The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets, Poetry Daily Essentials 2007, Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, and elsewhere. He has also published numerous essays on modern and contemporary poetry in the United States and abroad. He is Interim Dean of the School of the Arts at Emerson College in Boston.
Peter Guralnick has been called "a national resource" by Nat Hentoff for work that has argued passionately and persuasively for the vitality of this country's intertwined black and white traditions. His books include the prize-winning two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love. Of the first Bob Dylan wrote, "Elvis steps from the pages. You can feel him breathe. This book cancels out all others." Of the biography as a whole, the New York Times Book Review declared in a lead review, "It must be ranked among the most ambitious and crucial biographical undertakings yet devoted to a major American figure of the second half of the twentieth century." Other books include an acclaimed trilogy on American roots music, Sweet Soul Music, Lost Highway, and Feel Like Going Home; the biographical inquiry Searching for Robert Johnson; and the novel, Nighthawk Blues.
Major Jackson is the author of two collections of poetry: Hoops (Norton: 2006) and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia: 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. His third volume of poetry Holding Company is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He served as a creative arts fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at University of Massachusetts-Lowell. Major 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.
Belle Boussole [bell boo-soul] is producer/musician Bryan McGurn, and vocalist Nicole McGurn. This husband/wife duo defines their music as "electro-soul". The group combines influences ranging from classic soul to electro-lounge to form their unique and accessible sound.
Steve Almond is the author of two story collections, My Life in Heavy Metal and The Evil B.B. Chow, the non-fiction book Candyfreak, and the novel Which Brings Me to You, co-written with Julianna Baggott. He lives outside Boston with his wife and baby daughter Josephine, who can and will kick your ass with cuteness.
Frederick Speers studied American history and literature at Boston University, where he also received his MFA in poetry in 2000. For several years he lived and worked in the Netherlands before returning to the United States to work full-time in educational publishing. The recipient of the first annual Fitzpatrick Award from the Vermont Studio Center, which is given to poets who “focus on nature in all its many facets,” his poetry and essays have appeared in AGNI and elsewhere. Speers lives with his husband in Brooklyn, New York, where he is a textbook editor at Oxford University Press. He is at work on his first book of poems, Pink Nights.
