Author Biographies

Daniel Alarcón is associate editor of Etiqueta Negra, an award-winning monthly magazine published in his native Lima, Peru. His novel Lost City Radio won the 2008 PEN USA Award, and his most recent book, a story collection entitled El rey siempre está por encima del pueblo, has just been published in Mexico.

Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum is the author of Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, The Georgia Review, and The Best American Short Stories 2004. She directs the MFA Program in Writing at the University of California, San Diego, and lives in Los Angeles with her family.

Steve De Jarnatt grew up in Longview, Washington, where he briefly held the state high school track record in the quarter mile. He attended Occidental College, graduated from the Evergreen State College, and just completed the Creative Writing MFA program at Antioch University in Los Angeles. He currently lives in Los Angeles and wrote and directed the indie feature Miracle Mile, among many other film and television credits. He will be moving to Port Townsend, Washington, in the near future to live and write. This is the first fiction he ever sent out and his first published story.

Joseph Epstein is the author, most recently, of Fred Astaire, published by Yale University Press. He hopes soon to bring out his third collection of short stories.

Alice Fulton's first book of fiction, The Nightingales of Troy, was published by in 2008. "A Shadow Table" is from this linked collection, which follows a single family for one hundred years. Other stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize anthology. Fulton's eight books include Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems and Felt: Poems. She has been honored with the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, the Editors' Prize in Fiction, and a MacArthur fellowship. She lives in Ithaca, New York, and teaches at Cornell.

Karl Taro Greenfeld is the author of four nonfiction books, Speed Tribes, Standard Deviations, China Syndrome, and Boy Alone: A Brother's Memoir, about his autistic brother, Noah. His writing has previously been published in The Best American Travel Writing, The Best American Sports Writing, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading anthologies. His fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, Cream City Review, New York Tyrant, Asia Literary Review, and Evergreen Review. His journalism has appeared in Time, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times, GQ, Condé Nast Traveler, and Vogue, among other publications.

Eleanor Henderson received her MFA from the University of Virginia in 2005. Her fiction has appeared in journals including North American Review, Indiana Review, and Ninth Letter; her nonfiction has appeared in Poets & Writers, where she was a contributing editor, and Virginia Quarterly Review, where she is the chair of the fiction board. An assistant professor at James Madison University, she lives outside Charlottesville with her husband and son.

Greg Hrbek is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the author of a novel, The Hindenburg Crashes Nightly. His short fiction has appeared in Harper's, Salmagundi, Black Warrior Review, and The 2007 Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories. He teaches fiction at Skidmore College in New York.

Adam Johnson is a senior Jones Lecturer in creative writing at Stanford University. His fiction has appeared in Esquire, Harper's, Tin House, and The Paris Review. He is the author of Emporium, a short story collection, and the novel Parasites Like Us, which won a California Book Award.

Victoria Lancelotta was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of Here in the World: Thirteen Stories and the novel Far. Her fiction has appeared in Mississippi Review, The Threepenny Review, Nerve, McSweeney's, and other magazines, both print and electronic. She has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, the Djerassi Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony. She lives in Nashville with her husband, Steven Conti.

Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing and came to the United States in 1996. Her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, O Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and awards from the Lannan Foundation and the Whiting Foundation. She is the author of a collection of stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, which won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, and the Guardian First Book Award, and The Vagrants, a novel. She was selected by Granta as one of the twenty-one Best Young American Novelists under thirty-five. She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and their two sons and teaches at the University of California at Davis.

Rebecca Makkai's stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2008 and in journals including New England Review, The Threepenny Review, Shenandoah, and The Iowa Review. She lives near Chicago with her husband and daughter and is completing a novel.

Jill McCorkle is the author of five novels—The Cheer Leader, July 7th, Tending to Virginia, Ferris Beach, and Carolina Moon—and three story collections: Crash Diet, Final Vinyl Days, and Creatures of Habit. Her new collection, Going Away Shoes, will be published this fall. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Best American Short Stories, and New Stories from the South, among other publications. The recipient of the New England Book Award, the John Dos Passos Prize, and the North Carolina Award for Literature, she has taught creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Tufts, Harvard, Brandeis, and Bennington College. She is currently on the faculty at North Carolina State University.

Kevin Moffett is the author of the story collection Permanent Visitors. His short fiction has appeared in McSweeney's, New Stories from the South, Tin House, Harvard Review, The Best American Short Stories 2006, and elsewhere. He has received the Pushcart Prize, the Nelson Algren Award, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches in the MFA program at California State University, San Bernardino.

Richard Powers is the author of ten novels, most recently Generosity.

Annie Proulx lives and writes in Wyoming and New Mexico.

Ron Rash is the author of four novels, three books of poetry, and three collections of stories. He has won NEA fellowships in poetry and fiction and is a former O. Henry Award winner. His collection of short stories, Chemistry, was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Prize and winner of the Thomas Wolfe Award. Serena, his latest book, was also a 2008 PEN/Faulkner finalist. He teaches at Western Carolina University.

Alex Rose grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and graduated from Hampshire College in 1998, where he studied creative writing and film production. Since then, Rose has published stories and essays in The New York Times, The Reading Room, North American Review, the Providence Journal, The Forward, Ploughshares, Diagram, and others. He is the author of Synapse, a novella in hypertext, and The Musical Illusionist and Other Tales, a collection of short fiction. As a filmmaker, Rose has directed a number of short films, videos, and animations which have appeared on HBO, MTV, Comedy Central, ShowTime, and the BBC, as well as in over two dozen festivals worldwide. His latest film, Call It Fiction, a fourteen-minute comic drama starring Ron Silver, can be viewed on iTunes. In 2006 he designed and helped launch Hotel St. George Press (HSG), an online arts quarterly and literary press with national distribution. HSG has since published four critically acclaimed titles, including the handcrafted, limited-edition release Correspondences, by Ben Greenman. Currently Rose resides in Brooklyn, New York.

Ethan Rutherford's fiction has appeared in Esopus, New York Tyrant, VERB, Faultline, American Short Fiction, and Fiction on a Stick: New Stories by Minnesota Writers. His work received special mention in the 2009 Pushcart Prize anthology, and he is the recent recipient of a SASE/Jerome Foundation Grant for Emerging Writers. In 2009 he received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota.

Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka, Zambia, in 1980 and moved to the United States when she was nine. She has a B.A. from Yale, a Ph.D. from Harvard, and a job as an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley—all three in English. "Muzungu" is her first published short story. She has contributed nonfiction to Bidoun and The Believer.