Russell Banks

Russell Banks is the author of fourteen books of fiction, including the novels Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, and Cloudsplitter, and five collections of short stories, most recently The Angel on the Roof: New and Selected Stories. Two of his novels, The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction were made into award-winning motion pictures. His work has received numerous awards and has been widely translated and anthologized. He is a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is the President of the International Parliament of Writers. He lives in upstate New York with his wife, the poet Chase Twichell.

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Breyten Breytenbach

South African poet, painter, activist and writer Breyten Breytenbach has authored more than thirty books in both his native Afrikaans and English, including poetry, novels, short stories, essays and the much translated Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, a memoir of his life as a committed opponent of apartheid. Currently Global Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at New York University, he divides his time between New York, Paris and South Africa

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Carolyn Forché

Carolyn Forché is the much heralded author of four books of poetry: Blue Hour (HarperCollins, 2004); The Angel of History (1994), which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award; The Country Between Us (1982), which received the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets; and Gathering the Tribes (1976), which was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Stanley Kunitz. She is also the editor of Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993). She teaches in the MFA Program at George Mason University in Virginia.

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Jessica Hagedorn

Phillipine-born Jessica Hagedorn is a novelist, poet, and multi-media artist best known for her exuberant, inventive fiction, in which language performs as well as recounts the stories of her characters. While continuing to compose for both page and stage, she has also taught and lectured widely in both the US and abroad.

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Joyce Johnson

Joyce Johnson is the author of two memoirs, the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award winner, Minor Characters, and the highly praised Missing Men, published in 2004. Her other books include Door Wide Open, based upon her correspondence with Jack Kerouac, and the novels In the Night Cafe, Bad Connections and Come and Join the Dance. She taught memoir for fourteen years in the MFA program at Columbia University and currently teaches memoir and fiction at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. Until 1985, she worked as an editor for William Morrow, McGraw-Hill, The Dial Press and Atlantic Monthly Press.

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Pura López

Pura López Colomé was born in Mexico City in 1952. She established herself as one of her generation's more important poets with her first book, El sueño del cazador (1985). Since then, she has published several significant books—Un Cristal en Otro (1989), Aurora (1994, translation by Forrest Gander, Duration Press 1999), and Intemperie (1997). A literary critic and translator as well as a poet, she has rendered into Spanish major works by Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney and Breyten Breytenbach (Under the Volcano, 2007), among others.

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Grace Paley

Grace Paley (1922 - 2007) was a master of short fiction and lifelong activist for whom "the little disturbances" and "enormous changes" of her titles were what mattered most to write about. She taught fiction and creative writing for many years at City College in New York and at Sarah Lawrence College, where she was professor emerita. She was the recipient of many honors and awards, among them Poet Laureate of Vermont from 2003 to 2007.

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Tomás Segovia

Prize-winning poet, translator and essayist Tomás Segovia was born in Spain in 1927, studied in France and Morocco, and joined the exodus to Mexico after the Spanish Civil War. Founder of the publication Presencia (1946), director of La Revista Mexicana de Literatura (1958-1963), and a contributor to the magazines Plural and Vuelta, Segovia taught at the Colegio de Mexico and other universities before returning to Madrid, where he now lives. His work as a poet, most notably La luz provisional, is not separate from his literary criticism and works of translation. Major recognition includes awards named after Xavier Villaurrutia, Octavio Paz, and most recently, Juan Rulfo (2005).

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Juan Tovar

Engineer, actor, fiction writer, screenwriter and playright Juan Tovar has made his home for nearly thirty years in Cuernavaca and Tepoztlán, from where he has produced a virtual avalanche of plays, translations, film scripts and adaptations for the stage of such masterpieces as John Reed’s Insurgent Mexico, Hawthorne’s Rappacini’s Daughter and Carlos Fuentes’s early novel Aura. He has won numerous prizes for his work and has taught playwriting and theory in leading Mexican institutions.

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Chuck Wachtel

New Yorker Chuck Wachtel's books include Because We Are Here, a collection of short stories and novellas, and the novels Joe the Engineer, which won the PEN/Hemmingway Citation and The Gates. He is also the author of The Coriolis Effect, and most recently What Happens to Me, a collection of poems and short prose. He has taught at Purdue University, Sarah Lawrence College, and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He is currently an associate professor of creative writing at NYU.

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