Aris Janigian is author of two novels, Bloodvine, and its sequel, Riverbig. He also co-authored, along with April Greiman, Something from Nothing, a book on the philosophy of design. He was a contributing writer for WEST, the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, and from 1992-2005 was a Senior Professor of Humanities at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. In 2004 he was a finalist for the William Saroyan International Writing Prize from Stanford University, and in 2006 received the Anahid Literary Award from Columbia University. He lives in Los Angeles, but returns to the Central Valley seasonally to pack and ship wine grapes.

Eduardo Galeano is one of Latin America's most distinguished writers, journalists and historians. He is the author of the Memory of Fire trilogy, Open Veins of Latin America, Soccer in Sun and Shadow, and many other works. Born in Montevideo, in 1940, he lived in exile in Argentina and Spain for many years before returning to Uruguay. His work has inspired popular and classical music composers from all over the world. He speaks five languages. He was the recipient of the first Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom. He has been translated into over 20 languages. He has just been awarded "The Outstanding Citizen of the South," a new prize awarded by the Common Market of the South.

Colson Whitehead was born in Manhattan in 1969. After graduating from Harvard College, he started working at the Village Voice, where he wrote reviews of television, book, and music. His first novel, The Intuitionist, concerned intrigue in the department of Elevator Inspectors, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway and a winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Award. He published John Henry Days in 2001, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. The Colossus of New York, a book of essays about the titular city, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He is also the author of Apex Hides the Hurt, and this year's Sag Harbor. His reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in such publications as the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York magazine, Harper's and Granta.

Jane Smiley is a novelist and essayist. Her novel A Thousand Acres won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992, and her novel The All True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton won the 1999 Spur Award for Best Novel of the West. Her novel Horse Heaven was short-listed for the Orange Prize in 2002. She has contributed to a wide range of magazines, including The New Yorker, Elle, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, The American Prospect, Practical Horseman, The Guardian Sport Monthly, Real Simple, and Playboy. Smiley's latest book is Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, a history and anatomy of the novel as a literary form. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Veronica Gonzalez's fiction has been published or is forthcoming in many literary magazines and anthologies, including Bomb, The Massachusetts Review and Juncture: 25 Very Good Stories and 12 Excellent Drawings, an innovative cross-genre anthology she co-edited for Soft Skull Press. She has written on art for magazines and exhibition catalogues, and in 2004 began Rocky Point press, a small limited-editions press which produces handmade silk-screened books of artist-writer collaborations. twin time: or, how death befell me, her first novel, received the 2008 Premio Aztlan Literary Award for fiction.

Vanessa Place is a writer and lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues Press. She is the author of Dies: A Sentence, a 50,000-word, one-sentence novella; the post-conceptual novel La Medusa, and Notes on Conceptualisms, in collaboration with appropriation poet Robert Fitterman. Her nonfiction book, The Guilt Project: Rape and Morality will be published in 2010. Place is a regular contributor to X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly; other work has appeared in other publications, including Western Humanities Review, Northwest Review, Contemporary Literary Criticism, and Bookforum. Her text collaboration with Parisian artist performer Lamya Regragui will debut at Cent Quatre in Paris/Los Angeles in 2009, and she is with Los Angeles conceptual artist Stephanie Taylor on the film "Murderous Square Dance at the Spiral Jetty."

www.lesfigues.com

Abraham Verghese attended the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1990, where he obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree. At the time he had taken a sabbatical from an active AIDS practice. His first book, My Own Country, about AIDS in rural Tennessee, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1994 and was made into a movie. His second book, The Tennis Partner, was a New York Times Notable Book and a national bestseller. He has published extensively in the medical literature, and his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, The Atlantic, Esquire, Granta, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere.

Antonya Nelson is the author of eight books of fiction. Her works include Female Trouble and the novels Talking in Bed, Nobody's Girl, and Living to Tell. Nelson's work has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harpers, Redbook, and in many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as Prize Stories, the O. Henry Awards, and Best American Short Stories. The New Yorker called her one of the "twenty young fiction writers for the new millennium." She is also the recent recipient of the Rea Award for Short Fiction and is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEA Grant.

After attending Harvard University for two years, Marisa Silver left to co-direct a documentary film for PBS entitled Community of Praise. She then wrote and directed her first feature film called Old Enough which won the top prize at the Sundance Festival. She went on to direct three more feature films, "Permanent Record," "Vital Signs," and "He Said, She Said." Silver left directing to pursue writing and she made her fictional debut in The New Yorker. Her collection of short stories, Babe in Paradise, was published in 2001 and named a New York Times "Notable Book of the Year," and a Los Angeles Times "Best Book of the Year." She is the author of the novels No Direction Home, and The God of War.

Etgar Keret is internationally acclaimed for his short stories. Born in Tel Aviv in 1967 to an extremely diverse family, his brother heads an Israeli group that lobbies for the legalization of marijuana, and his sister is an orthodox Jew and the mother of ten children. Keret regards his family as a microcosm of Israel. His book, The Nimrod Flip-Out, is a collection of 32 short stories that captures the craziness of life in Israel today. His other books include Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God, Missing Kissinger, and Gaza Blues. Over 40 short movies have been based on his stories. Keret is the writer of several feature screenplays, including Skin Deep which won First Prize at several international film festivals and was awarded the Israeli Oscar. Wrist Cutters, featuring Tom Waits, was released in August 2007. Jellyfish, his first movie as a director along with his wife Shira Geffen, won the coveted Camera d'Or prize for best first feature at the Cannes Film Festival 2007. Keret is at present a lecturer in the film department at Tel Aviv University.

http://www.etgarkeret.com

Irvine Welsh grew up in a housing project outside Edinburgh, Scotland. He left school at the age of sixteen, took a series of dead-end jobs, and eventually received a Master of Business Studies degree.