Author Biographies

Guest Editor 2007

Stephen King is the author of sixty books, including Misery, The Green Mile, Cell, and Lisey’s Story, as well as about four hundred short stories, including "The Man in the Black Suit," which won the O. Henry Prize in 1996. King was the 2003 recipient of the Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award from the National Book Foundation.

Contributing Authors

Louis Auchincloss, the author of over sixty books, published his first novel, The Indifferent Children, in 1947. He has received the NAIBA Legacy Award for lifetime literary achievement and was the president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2000, the New York Landmarks Conservancy honored him as a “Living Landmark,” and in 2005, Mr. Auchincloss received the National Medal of Arts, our country’s highest
recognition for artistic achievement.

John Barth’s fiction has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction, and the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. For many years he taught in the Writing Seminars at
Johns Hopkins University. He and his wife live in Chestertown, Maryland, and Bonita Springs, Florida. “Toga Party” is part of a story series in progress about life in a fictional gated community on Maryland’s Eastern
Shore.

Ann Beattie has published seven novels and eight story collections (most recently, Follies: New Stories) and teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Virginia.

T. C. Boyle is the author of nineteen works of fiction, including Talk Talk (2006), Tooth and Claw (2005), and The Inner Circle (2004). He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a member of the English Department at USC. His Web site, where all sorts of engaging, lively, and polymorphously perverse ideas are expressed, is tcboyle.com. All are welcome there.

Randy DeVita received his MFA in 2006 from Bowling Green State University, where he won the Devine Award for fiction. His work has appeared in The Fiddlehead, West Branch, Third Coast, and Orchid, and it received a Special Mention in the 2007 Pushcart Prize anthology.

Joseph Epstein is the author of two collections of short stories, The Goldin Boys and Fabulous Small Jews. He is currently working on a book about Fred Astaire and another on gossip.

William Gay is the author of three novels and a collection of short stories, I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down. His novel Twilight was published in winter 2006. His fiction and essays have appeared in various magazines. He lives in rural Tennessee where he is at work on a novel.

Mary Gordon’s most recent novel, Pearl, was published in January 2005 by Pantheon Books. Her previous novels — Final Payments, The Company of Women, Men and Angels, The Other Side, and Spending — have been bestsellers. She has also written a critically acclaimed memoir, The Shadow Man. In addition, she has published a book of novellas, The Rest of Life; a collection of stories, Temporary Shelter; two books of essays, Good Boys and Dead Girls and Seeing Through Places; and a biography of Joan of Arc. Ms. Gordon has received the Lila Acheson Wallace Reader’s Digest Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. For three years (1983, 1997, and 2000), she was the recipient of the O. Henry Award for best short story. Mary is Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College.

Lauren Groff is a native of Cooperstown, New York, and has an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including The Atlantic Monthly, Five Points, and Ploughshares, as well as in Best New American Voices. She was an Axton Fellow in Fiction at the University of Louisville, and her novel, The Monsters of Templeton, will be published in spring 2008.

Beverly Jensen grew up in Westbrook, Maine, earned an MFA in acting at Southern Methodist University, and performed in regional theater before turning to writing. Between 1986 and 2003, she wrote a series of
interrelated stories and plays, based on the lives of her mother, Idella, and her aunt Avis. Ms. Jensen lived in New York with her husband, Jay Silverman, and her children, Noah and Hannah. In 2003, she died of cancer at the age of forty-nine.

Roy Kesey is the author of All Over, a collection of stories that will be published by Dzanc Books in October 2007, and of Nothing in the World, winner of the 2005 Bullfight Media Little Book Prize. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The New England Review, Ninth Letter, Other Voices, and American Short Fiction, among other magazines, as well as in New Sudden Fiction 2006 and the Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize anthology. He currently lives with his wife and children in Beijing, where he spends most of his time walking around and looking at things and nodding and shaking his head.

Stellar Kim was born in Seoul, Korea, and grew up in New York City. She graduated from Boston College and completed the MFA program at CUNY Brooklyn College. Stellar has taught English at Brooklyn College
and Albertus Magnus College; currently, she lives in Boston and works as a writer in the nonprofit sector. She has recently received writing awards from The Iowa Review and The Atlantic Monthly. “Findings & Impressions” is her first published story.

Aryn Kyle’s first novel, The God of Animals, was published by Scribner in March 2007. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, StoryQuarterly, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from the University of Montana and is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award and a National Magazine Award in fiction.

Bruce McAllister’s short fiction has appeared in national magazines, literary quarterlies, “year’s best” anthologies, and college readers since the 1960s. His second novel, Dream Baby — based on a short story
that was a finalist for the Nebula and Hugo Awards — received a National Endowment for the Arts writing fellowship and was called “one of the most memorable chronicles of the Vietnam War” by Publishers Weekly. “The Boy in Zaquitos” will be included in a collection of his short fiction, The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories, due from Golden Gryphon Press in 2007. A graduate of the MFA program at the University of California– Irvine, he taught at the University of Redlands in southern California for twenty years. He now works as a writing coach and a book and screenplay consultant.

Alice Munro was born in Wingham, Ontario, to a family of fox and poultry farmers. She began writing as a teenager and published her first story, “The Dimensions of a Shadow,” while a student at the University of
Western Ontario. She has published twelve collections of stories — Dance of the Happy Shades; Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You; The Beggar Maid; The Moons of Jupiter; The Progress of Love; Friend of My Youth; Open Secrets; Selected Stories; The Love of a Good Woman; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; Runaway; and The View from Castle Rock — as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women. During her distinguished career, Ms. Munro has received many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and its Giller Prize; the Rea Award for Short Fiction; the Lannan Literary Award; England’s WH Smith Award; and the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award. She and her husband divide their time between Clinton, Ontario, and Comox, British Columbia.

A 1978 graduate of Yale with a BS in physics, Eileen Pollack earned an MFA from the University of Iowa, where she was awarded a Teaching- Writing Fellowship. She is the author of a collection of short fiction, The Rabbi in the Attic and Other Stories; a novel, Paradise, New York; and a work of creative nonfiction called Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull, which was a 2003 WILLA Award finalist. A new collection of stories and novellas called In the Mouth is forthcoming from Four
Way Books. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Michener Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. Her stories have appeared in journals such as Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, Agni, and New England Review; they have won two Pushcart Prizes, the Cohen Award for best fiction of the year from Ploughshares, and similar awards from Literary Review and MQR. Ms. Pollack is the Zell Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan.

Karen Russell’s first collection of short stories, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, was published by Knopf in 2006 and is forthcoming in paperback. Her stories have recently appeared in Conjunctions, Granta, Zoetrope, Oxford American, and The New Yorker. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker debut fiction issue, and in 2007 she was picked as one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Twenty-five years old, she lives in New York City, where she is working on a novel called Swamplandia!,
about a family of alligator wrestlers.

Novelist and screenwriter Richard Russo won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls. He lives and works in Maine.

Jim Shepard is the author of six novels, including most recently Project X (Knopf, 2004), and two story collections, including most recently Love and Hydrogen (Vintage, 2004). His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, DoubleTake, Granta, The New Yorker, and Playboy, and he is a columnist on film for the magazine The Believer. A third story collection, Like You’d Understand Anyway, and a collection of his film essays, Heroes in Disguise, will appear in 2007. He teaches at Williams College and in the Warren Wilson MFA program.

Kate Walbert is the author of the novels The Gardens of Kyoto and Our Kind, which was a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award, as well as the linked story collection, Where She Went. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Antioch Review, DoubleTake, the 2000 Pushcart Prize anthology, and O. Henry Award Prize Stories 2000, among other publications. She lives with her husband and daughters in New York City.