Geoff Dyer is the author of four novels, a critical study of John Berger, and a collection of essays titled Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. Hi has authored six highly original nonfiction books, including the recent Zona and But Beautiful, awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize, and Out of Sheer Rage, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.

Howard A. Rodman is a professor of screenwriting at USC's School of Cinematic Arts, Vice President of the Writers Guild of America, West, and has served as Artistic Director of the Sundance Screenwriting Labs. He wrote the screenplays for the films Savage Grace, August, and Joe Gould’s Secret. Rodman is on the executive committee of the Writers Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and is a Fellow of the Los Angeles Institute of the Humanities.

Denis Johnson is the author of plays, poetry, non-fiction, and fiction, including the National Book Award-winning Tree of Smoke, Train Dreams, and Jesus’ Son. He serves as Playwright in Residence for the Campo Santo Theater Company in San Francisco.

Cedering Fox is the Founder and Artistic Director of WordTheatre. Since partnering with Darrell Larson on Literary Evenings at The Met, she has been creating, producing, and directing unique theatrical, literary events in America and England: intimate Author/Actor series themed benefits for other important organizations, performances/readings by actors and authors in Title l Schools. In England, partnered with Kirsty Peart, WordTheate is tapped annually to present the shortlist for The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the richest prize in the world for a single short story. WordTheatre's annual July Writers Workshop and Retreat set in the heart of England's Peak District will be led by Andre Dubus lll. Cedering’s voice has been heard on hundreds of television promos and commercials as well as on live events such as the 2012 and 2013 Oscars.

Darrell Larson made his New York debut directing and starring in Tom Strelich's Dog Logic with Lois Smith at American Place Theatre. He has directed many Sam Shepard plays, Steve Earle'sKarla and Adam Rapp's 'blistering hip hop apocalyptic horror show Faster. He has collaborated several times with Denis Johnson in Shoppers Carried By Escalators into the Flames, Psychos Never Dream, and The Starlight on Idaho. Larson directed Charles Mee's Big Love and David Ives' All in the Timing, and adapted and directed The Wizard of Oz In Concert. He has acted in over thirty films and scores of television programs. Larson created and hosted Literary Evenings at the MET live and directed and hosted The Act of Poetry for four years at the Chateau Marmont.

Michelle Huneven is the author of three previous novels:Blame, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Jamesland, and Round Rock.

Mona Simpson’s novels include My Hollywood, A Regular Guy, Off Keck Road, The Lost Father and Anywhere But Here. Her work has been recognized with numerous prizes, including the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize, the Whiting Writer’s Award, and a Guggenheim fellowship. Most recently, she was the recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and letters. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, Harpers, The Atlantic, McSweeney’s and The Paris Review.

Christopher Bollas, Ph.D., is a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies, and an Honorary Member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) in New York. Among his books are Catch Them Before They Fall (The Psychoanalysis of Breakdown) and The Christopher Bollas Reader, with forward by Adam Phillips.

Edward St. Aubyn was born in London in 1960. He is the author of a series of highly acclaimed novels about the Melrose family, including At Last and Mother’s Milk, which was short-listed for the 2006 Man Booker Prize as well as the novels A Clue to the Exit and On the Edge.

Michael Silverblatt is the host of KCRW's half-hour radio show Bookworm, where he introduces listeners to new and emerging authors along with writers of renown. He created Bookworm for KCRW-FM in 1989.

Anne Germanacos is the author of the short-story collection In the Time of the Girls by BOA Editions. Together with her husband, Nick Germanacos, she ran the Ithaka Cultural Studies Program on the islands of Kalymnos and Crete. She now runs the Germanacos Foundation in San Francisco.

Dinah Lenney wrote Bigger than Life: A Murder, a Memoir, published in Tobias Wolff’s American Lives Series at the University of Nebraska Press, and co-authored Acting for Young Actors. A longtime actor herself, she’s appeared on stage, in movies, and in countless episodes of primetime television. Her prose has been published in many journals and anthologies. A graduate of Yale and the Neighborhood Playhouse, Dinah serves as core faculty in the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC and in the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she earned her MFA. Her new memoir is The Object Parade.

Matias Viegener is an artist, author, and critic who teaches at CalArts. He is one of the members of the art collective Fallen Fruit, which has exhibited internationally in Mexico, Colombia, Denmark, Austria (Ars Electronica), LACMA, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and ARCO 2010 in Madrid. He writes regularly on art for X-tra and ArtUS, has recently published in Cabinet, Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, Radical History Review, and Black Clock, and is the co-editor of Séance in Experimental Writing The Noulipian Analects. His book 2500 Random Things About Me Too was published in 2012 by Les Figues Press.

Jim Krusoe has published five novels and two books of stories,Blood Lake and Abductions. His first novel, Iceland, was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2002. Since then, Tin House Books has published Girl Factory, Erased, Toward You, and Parsifal. Jim teaches writing at Santa Monica College as well as in Antioch's MFA Creative Writing Program. He has also published five books of poems.

Colson Whitehead is the author of the New York Times bestseller Zone One as well as the novels Sag Harbor; The Intuitionist, a finalist for the PEN/ Hemingway award John Henry Days, which won the Young Lions Fiction Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Apex Hides the Hurt, winner of the PEN Oakland Award. He has also written a book of essays about his hometown,The Colossus of New York. A recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship, he lives in New York City.

Laurie Winer is a long-time journalist who has been on staff at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. She is a founding editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Laurie is inexplicably proud that she has played poker in Vegas, Macau, and every card room in Southern California.

Geraldine Brooks is an award-winning author and journalist. Brooks covered environmental issues as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald, and at The Wall Street Journal she focused on crises in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. In 2006 she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, and in that same year she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for her novel March. Brooks’ most recent novel, Caleb’s Crossing, was a New York Times best seller. Other novels, Year of Wonders and People of the Book, are international bestsellers, translated into more than 25 languages. She is also the author of the nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence.

Carla Kaplan is the Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature at Northeastern University and the author of several books, including The Erotics of Talk: Women's Writing and Feminist Paradigms, Miss Anne in Harlem, and the highly acclaimed Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, the first published collection of a major African American woman's letters- which made Kaplan a finalist for the NAACP Image Award. Kaplan has received numerous academic honors, including the Robert D. Klein Award, the Mary L. Cornille Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Wellesley College, fellowships from The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Culture among others. She is an occasional contributor to The Los Angeles Times and The Nation, and lectures widely on literature and culture.

Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, and Further Tales of the City have been the basis of three highly acclaimed television miniseries. He is also the author of Babycakes, Significant Others, Sure of You and Maybe the Moon. His most recent novel, The Night Listener, became a major motion picture starring Robin Williams and Toni Collette. Maupin lives in San Francisco with his partner, Christopher Turner.

Jane Smiley was born in Los Angeles, California, moved to the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri as an infant, and lived there through grammar school and high school (The John Burroughs School). After getting her B.A. at Vassar College in 1971, she traveled in Europe for a year, working on an archeological dig and sightseeing, and then returned to Iowa for graduate school at the University of Iowa.

M.F.A. and Ph.D. in hand, she went to work in 1981 at Iowa State University in Ames, where she taught until 1996. She has two daughters, Phoebe Silag and Lucy Silag, and one son, AJ Mortensen. Jane is the author of ten works of fiction, including The Age of Grief, The Greenlanders, Ordinary Love and Good Will, A Thousand Acres, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, Moo, Horse Heaven and Good Faith, as well as many essays for such magazines as Vogue, The New Yorker, Practical Horseman, Harper's, the New York Times Magazine and the New York Times travel section, Victoria, Mirabella, Allure, The Nation and others. She has written on politics, farming, horse training, child-rearing, literature, impulse buying, getting dressed, Barbie, marriage, and many other topics. She is also the author of the nonfiction book A Year at the Races and from Penguin Lives Series, a biography of Charles Dickens. Her new book, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, will be published by Knopf in Sept 2005.

Jane lives in Northern California, as do several of her horses.

Marianne Wiggins is the author of seven books of fiction, including John Dollar, Almost Heaven, and Eveless Eden, which was nominated for the Orange Prize. She has won the Whiting Writers' Award, an NEA grant, and the Janet Heidinger Kafka prize. She won the Commonwealth Club of California Book Award and was a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist for Evidence of Things Unseen.

Marilyn Chin teaches at San Diego State University and is on the mentor faculty of City University of Hong Kong. She has won numerous awards for her poetry, including the United Artist Foundation Fellowship, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at Bellagio, and the PEN/Josephine Miles Award. She is featured in a variety of anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women and The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. In addition to writing poetry and tales, she has translated poems by the modern Chinese poet Ai Qing and co-translated poems by the Japanese poet Gozo Yoshimasu.

Toi Derricotte has published five collections of poetry, most recently, The Undertaker's Daughter. Her literary memoir The Black Notebooks won the 1998 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Among her many honors are the 2012 Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement and the 2012 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry for a poet whose distinguished and growing body of work represents a notable presence in American literature. Cornelius Eady co-founded Cave Canem Foundation. She is Professor Emerita at the University of Pittsburgh and serves on the Academy of American Poets Board of Chancellors.

Percival Everett is the author of twenty-five books. Among them are Erasure, Glyph, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, and Wounded, all from Graywolf Press. His most recent volume of poetry is Swimming Swimmers Swimming, published by Red Hen Press. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Alice Quinn is Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America and an adjunct professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of the Arts. She was poetry editor at The New Yorker from 1987-2007 and at Alfred A. Knopf from 1976-1986. She is the editor of Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop. Her articles on and interviews with writers, poets, and artists have appeared in Artforum, the Canadian National Post, The Forward, Poetry Ireland, The New Yorker, and The New Yorker Online. She is currently editing the journals and notebooks of Elizabeth Bishop.