Miguel Syjuco has a master's degree from Columbia University and is completing his Ph.D. at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He received the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize and the Philippines' highest literary honor, the Palanca Award, for the unpublished manuscript of Ilustrado. Born in 1976 into a political family in Manila, Syjuco left the Philippines to become a writer.

Cecilia Manguerra Brainard is the award-winning author of 6 books, including the novels, When the Rainbow Goddess Wept and Magdalena. She has edited several books including the collection of stories for young adults, Growing Up Filipino II: More Stories for Young Adults. She teaches at UCLA-Extension's Writers Program.

Ian McEwan is the bestselling author of thirteen books, including the novels On Chesil Beach; Saturday; Atonement, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the W. H. Smith Literary Award; The Comfort of Strangers and Black Dogs, both shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Amsterdam, winner of the Booker Prize; and The Child in Time, winner of the Whitbread Award; as well as the story collections "First Love, Last Rites," winner of the Somerset Maugham Award; and "In Between the Sheets." He lives in London.

Anchee Min was born in Shanghai in 1957. During the Cultural Revolution, she was ordered by Communist officials to denounce Pearl Buck as an American imperialist. At seventeen, she was sent to a labor collective, where a talent scout for Madame Mao's Shanghai Film Studio recruited her to work as a movie actress. Min moved to the United States in 1984. Her first book, the memoir Red Azalea, became an international bestseller and was published in twenty countries.

Laila Lalami was born and raised in Morocco. She studied Linguistics at Université Mohammed-V in Rabat, University College London, and the University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a British Council Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship. She was short-listed for the Caine Prize for African Writing (the "African Booker") in 2006 and for the National Book Critics' Circle Nona Balakian Award in 2009. Her debut collection of short stories, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, was published in the fall of 2005 and has since been translated into into six languages. Her first novel, Secret Son, was published in the spring of 2009. She is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o, currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine, was born in Kenya, in 1938 into a large peasant family. He was educated at Kamandura, Manguu and Kinyogori primary schools; Alliance High School, all in Kenya; Makerere University College (then a campus of London University), Kampala, Uganda; and the University of Leeds, Britain. He is recipient of seven Honorary Doctorates viz D Litt (Albright); PhD (Roskilde); D Litt (Leeds); D Litt &Ph D (Walter Sisulu University); PhD (Carlstate); D Litt (Dillard) and D Litt (Auckland University). He is also Honorary Member of American Academy of Letters. A many-sided intellectual, he is novelist, essayist, playwright, journalist, editor, academic and social activist.

Sapphire is the author of American Dreams, a collection of poetry which was cited by Publishers Weekly as, "One of the strongest debut collections of the nineties." Push, her novel, won the Book-of-the-Month Club Stephen Crane award for First Fiction, the Black Caucus of the American Library Association's First Novelist Award, and, in Great Britain, the Mind Book of the Year Award, and named by the Village Voice and Time Out New York as one of the top ten books of 1996. Sapphire's work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Spin, and Bomb. Precious, the film adaption of her novel, recently won the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Awards in the U.S. dramatic competition at Sundance (2009).

Brighde Mullins' plays have been produced in New York, London, and San Francisco. Titles include: Monkey in the Middle, Fire Eater, Topographical Eden; Pathological Venus. She has received a Whiting Foundation Award; an NEA Fellowship and others. She has taught at Harvard University and at Brown University, and for fifteen years she curated the Reading Series at Dia Art Foundation in New York. She is currently the Director of the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC.

Lionel Shriver is the author of The Female Species, Checker and the Derailleurs, Ordinary Decent Criminals, Game Control, A Perfectly Good Family, and Double Fault. Shriver is also the author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, a novel about a Columbine-style massacre told by the mother of the killer. An international bestseller, Kevin won the prestigious Orange Prize in 2005. Her book The Post-Birthday World was published to great critical acclaim in 2007. Shriver's essays, features, and comment pieces have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Independent, London's Times, The Daily Mail, Salon.com, and many others.

Elif Batuman was born in New York City, grew up in New Jersey, and went to college at Harvard. She completed a PhD in comparative literature at Stanford University in 2007. She currently lives in San Francisco, and teaches at Stanford in the Interdisciplinary Humanities program. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, the London Review of Books, the Guardian, the Nation, and n+1. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and has a cat called Friday.

Elizabeth Kostova graduated from Yale and holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won the Hopwood Awardfor the Novel-in-Progress.

T.C. Boyle is the author of eleven novels, including World's End, which won the 1987 PEN/Faulkner Award, The Tortilla Curtain, which has now sold over 400,000 thousand copies in paperback, and Drop City, a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award. He has also published eight collections of stories and was the recipient of the prestigious PEN/MalamudAward for Excellence in the short story. His stories appear regularly in The New Yorker, GQ, Esquire, McSweeney's, and Playboy. He lives near Santa Barbara in The George C. Stewart House, the first private residence that Frank Lloyd Wright built in California, which is celebrating its centennial in 2009.

Nora Gallagher is the author of two memoirs Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith and Practicing Resurrection. Her first novel, Changing Light, was published in early 2007. Her essays, book reviews and journalism have appeared in many publications including The New York Times Magazine, DoubleTake, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Utne Reader, The Village Voice, and Mother Jones.

www.noragallagher.org