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.
His latest book, Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, has been hailed as "monumental, panoramic, an epic tale told against a backdrop of brilliant, shimmering music, intense personal melodrama, and vast social changes.
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.
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 feature film by Paramount Pictures. Her new novel Repeat After Me, is about a young American ESL teacher, a troubled Chinese radical, and their unexpected New York romance. Rachel has a BA in English from Columbia and an MFA in poetry from Boston University. Her first collection of poems, called The Caretaker’s Daughter, is about girls (including her) in the Missouri Ozarks.
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.
