Jan Beatty’s books include The Switching Yard (forthcoming, 2013), Red Sugar (2008, Finalist, Paterson Prize), Boneshaker (2002), and Mad River (1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize), all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her chapbook, Ravage, was published in 2012 by Lefty Blondie Press. Awards include the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, two PCA fellowships, and a $15,000 Creative Achievement Award from the Heinz Foundation. Beatty has read her work widely, at venues such as the Geraldine R. Dodge Festival, Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and Split This Rock. Beatty hosts and produces Prosody, a public radio show on NPR affiliate WESA-FM featuring national writers. She directs the creative writing program at Carlow University where she teaches in the MFA program. www.janbeatty.com

SHERWIN BITSUI is the author of two poetry books, Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press, 2003), and FloodSong (Copper Canyon Press, 2009). His honors include a Whiting Writers Award, a 2010 PEN Open Book Award and an American Book Award. He is originally from Baa’oogeedí (White Cone, Arizona on the Navajo Nation. Currently, he lives in Tucson. He is Diné of the Todich’íi’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tł’ízíłání (Many Goats Clan). www.bitsui.com

JOY CASTRO is the author of the literary thriller Hell or High Water (St. Martin’s, 2012) and the memoirs The Truth Book (Arcade, 2005) and Island of Bones (University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming 2012). Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, North American Review, Seneca Review, and The New York Times Magazine.  She is an associate professor and the associate director of the Institute for Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she teaches literature, creative writing, and Latino studies.  www.joycastro.com.

RACHEL COHN is the author of numerous award-winning young adult novels, including the Betas series, Gingerbread, You Know Where to Find Me, and, with David Levithan, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist and Dash & Lily's Book of Dares. She lives in Los Angeles and she can be found on the web at www.rachelcohn.com.

MARK E. CULL is the author of the short story collection One Way Donkey Ride (Asylum Arts) and a novel King of the Sea Monkeys (forthcoming Guernica Editions) and has co-edited three short storyanthologies; Anyone is Possible, Blue Cathedral and The Crucifix is Down. He is Publisher of Red Hen Press, which he founded in 1994 with Kate Gale. During the time Red Hen Press has become one of the leading independent literary presses in North America, he has designed and produced more than twenty volumes of literary fiction and poetry a year. He also serves on the board of WriteGirl a Los Angeles-based organization that promotes creativity and self-expression to empower girls.

GABRIEL JASON DEAN is a New York / Austin- based playwright who originally hails from Atlanta, GA. His plays have been produced or developed at Theatre Row, Hangar Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, the Lark, New York Stage & Film, People’s Light, ASSITEJ International, The Kennedy Center,  Oregon Shakespeare, Dallas Children’s Theatre, A Red Orchid Theatre, Aurora Theatre, Dad's Garage Theatre, Actor's Express, Horizon Theatre, Illinois Shakespeare Festival, FronteraFest, Source Festival and Essential Theatre.  Gabriel received the Kennedy Center’s ACTF 2012 Paula Vogel Prize, Theatre for Young Audience’s Award and was Runner-Up for the National Steinberg Award.  In 2011, he received the Kennedy Center’s ACTF Ken Ludwig Prize for a body of work from an emerging writer and was Runner-Up for the Princess Grace Award.  His script for children, The Transition of Doodle Pequeño received the 2011 New England Theatre Conference Aurand Harris Award and was selected for the 2012 Kennedy Center New Visions / New Voices Conference with People’s Light and Theatre Company.  He is the recipient of the 2010 Essential Theatre New Play Prize and won the 2010 Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival.  Gabriel was voted “Best Playwright” in 2009 by Creative Loafing: Atlanta. In 2005, he won the City of Atlanta Bureau of Cultural Affairs Playwriting Award. Other plays have been finalists or semi-finalists for the Seven Devils Conference, The O’Neill Theatre Conference, PlayPenn, JAW, Bay Area Playwright’s Festival, Interact’s 20/20 Commissions, the Lark Playwright’s Week and Aurora Theatre’s Global Age Project.  His scripts are available through Dramatic Publishing, Playscripts and Samuel French.  Gabriel's poetry, fiction and journalism has been published in Snake Nation Review, The Tower, Eclectica Magazine, The Melic Review, and Creative Loafing. He received the Porter Fleming Prize for Fiction and the Sidney Lanier Prize for Poetry.   Gabriel is on faculty for Spalding University’s Brief-Residency MFA Program. BA: Oglethorpe University. MFA: Michener Center for Writers—UT Austin.

NATALIE DIAZ was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. She was part of the Old Dominion LadyMonarch basketball team that made it to the NCAA Championship game in 1997. After playing professionalbasketball in Europe and Asia for several years, Diaz returned to Old Dominion and completed a double-MFA in poetry and fiction. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press in April of 2012. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Black Renaissance Noire, Crab Orchard Review, and others. Diaz currently lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona, and directs the Fort Mojave Language Recovery Program, working with the last remaining speakers at Fort Mojave to teach and revitalize the Mojave language.

DAVID ALLAN EVANS was born and raised in Sioux City, Iowa, and began college on a football scholarship. He has a B.A. from Morningside College, an M.A. from the University of Iowa, and an M.F.A. from the University of Arkansas. He has won writing grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bush Artist Foundation; he has twice been a Fulbright Scholar to China. Recently he received the 2009 Governor’s Award for Creative Distinction in the Arts. He is the author of eight collections of poems, the most recent being  The Bull Rider’s Advice: New and Selected Poems, as well as several books of prose, including a memoir about growing up in Sioux City. He has edited and co-edited several anthologies. His poems, short stories, and essays have been published in numerous magazines and journals, and in over 80 anthologies, including Shenandoah, Poetry Northwest, Southern Review, Esquire, Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, Prairie Schooner, Heartland: Poets of the Midwest, Best Poems of 1969 (The Borestone Awards), The HBJ Treasury of Literature, Poetspeak, Imagining Home: Writing from the Midwest, The Norton Book of Sports, Motion: The Anthology of American Sports Poems, and The Poets Guide to Birds. He was named Poet Laureate of South Dakota by the governor in 2002. His poem, “Neighbors,” was the first poem to be re-printed in the popular newspaper column and website, “American Life in Poetry,” established by Ted Kooser,former U.S. Poet Laureate. Evans lives in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

D. SCOTT GLASSER is the Chair of the University of Nebraska at Omaha Department of Theatre where he teaches directing, acting, voice, theory, film and Shakespeare.  Scott has been a director, playwright, actor, dramaturg and teacher at such theatres as the Guthrie Theatre, GeVa Repertory (Rochester), Opera Institute (Boston), ACT (Seattle), Chanhassen Dinner Theatre, Children's Theater Company (Minneapolis), Skylight Opera Theatre, Madison and Minnesota Operas, Utah and Nebraska Shakespeare Festivals and many others.  He recently directed A Walk in the Woods and At The Vanishing Point for the Great Plains Theatre Conference.  Scott received an MFA in Acting from Cornell University, helped create Willamette University’s theater program, co-founded the Dakota Theatre Caravan, was a resident actor/director at the St. Paul Actors Theatre, produced and performed at the Edinburgh International Fringe, was Artistic Director of Madison Repertory Theatre from 1993 to 2002, and is a longstanding member of Actors Equity and the Stage Directors & Choreographers unions.   He has directed over 160 plays, operas and musicals,including his translationof Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and adaptations of Much Ado About Nothing, and Aristophanes’ The Birds, as well as premieres of plays by Lee Blessing, Jon Klein, Martha Boesing, and Steven Dietz.  He has assisted playwrights in the development of many works, including David Feldshuh’s Miss Ever’s Boys.   He was also involved in 10 years of workshops and performances of developing plays At The Playwright’s Center and the Midwest Playlabs.   He has edited and shaped over 30 productions of Shakespeare’s plays.  Recent productions have toured to an international theatre festival in Siauliai, Lithuania, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian and the Newseum in Washington DC.

(Playwright in Residence) Benjamin Graber has been a hippie doctor, a sex doctor, a psychiatrist, and a neurobiologist. His research archives are available at the Kinsey Institute at the University of Indiana. He holds an MA in Theatre from the University of Nebraska at Omaha and an MD from the University of Michigan Medical School. He is a board certified psychiatrist and neurologist and served for many years as a Professor at the University of Nebraska Medical School. During his years in medical academics, he authored academic articles, book chapters, abstracts, and national and international meetingpresentations, including in Italy, Mexico, Israel, and Venezuela.  His co-authored non-fiction text, Woman’s Orgasm, has remained in print for thirty-six years , and his edited text, Circumvaginal Musculature and Sexual Function is in its thirtieth year of continuous publication. He has been a continuous member of the International Association of Sex Researchers for thirty years. In the world of creative writing, his short fiction and poetry have appeared in various venues, including Fine Line Journal, Defenestration, Anti-Muse, Canopic Jar, Uber, Spillway Review, and an anthology of Nebraska poets, Annex 22. He fell in love with playwriting after attending the firstGreat Plains Theatre Conference in 2006; subsequently the GPTC selected for their highly competitive Playlab staged reading two of his one act plays, Party Favor in 2007 and Wedding Party in 2008 and two of his full length plays Warpaint in 2009 and Heteronormativity in 2010. His first full-length play, Hippie Doctor, his MA thesis play, achieved an unusual status for a student play: a full production at the University of Nebraska at Omaha in their main stage series in 2009. Warpaint, his co-authored play with Cleveland playwright Michael Oatman, was a 2009 national finalist at the Kennedy Center American Theatre Festival in Washington, D.C., and received its world premiere production in 2010 at the Shelterbelt Theatre. His one act plays, Banana Republic, Masque, and The Guru and the Turtle, and the co-authored Snipped, have all been fully produced. His ten-minute play, End of Limerence, has been produced several times, most recently in Florida. For 2010-2011 he was honored with Core Apprentice at the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis where his aforementioned full length play, Heternormativity, was work shopped and read summer of 2010. Mosty recently Heteronomativity was a finalist at the prestigous for the 2011 WordBRIDGE Playwrights Laboratory In addition to playwriting, he has served as director, assistant director or dramaturg for many theatre productions. In 2010 he was appointed Playwright in Residence at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He was deeply involved in the addition of the playwriting track the University of Nebraska's Masters in Fine Arts in Writing Program, making it one of few such programs to have a track exclusively for playwrights. Since 2010 he has been serving as Playwright in Residence. www.benjamingraber.com

STEPHANIE ELIZONDO GRIEST has mingled with the Russian Mafia, polished Chinese propaganda, and belly danced with Cuban rumba queens. These adventures inspired her memoir Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana (Villard/Random House, 2004) and guidebook 100 Places Every Woman Should Go (Travelers’ Tales, 2007). Atria/Simon & Schuster published her memoir Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines in 2008. She has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Latina Magazine, and the Associated Press. An avid traveler, she has explored five continents and once spent a year driving 45,000 miles  across the United States, documenting its history for a website for kids called The Odyssey. A 2005-2006 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, she lectures and performs nationwide, and recently won the Gold Prize for Best Travel Book in the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition. Visit her website at www.aroundthebloc.com.

JAMES JAY has worked as a bartender, a wild land firefighter, book seller, surveyor, and furniture mover. He lives in Flagstaff, Arizona where he has taught poetry at the jail, the public schools, and Northern Arizona University. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including The Huffington Post, Crab Creek Review, and Nerve Bundle Review. He was selected for the New Poets of the American West anthology in 2010.He received a MFA from The University of Montana and a MA in Literature from Northern Arizona University. Currently, he is a writer for FlagLive!, writing the Bartender Wisdom bi-monthly column; and has served for many years as the Executive Director of the Northern Arizona Book Festival. He owns a bar, Uptown Billiards, with his wife, the musician Alyson Jay, and they have a son named Wilson who was born last September. They have three dogs of varying mutt types (pit mix, boxer mix, a coyote mix from parts unknown). In 2010 he received the Arizona Daily Sun’s People’s Choice Award for best author and won the Viola Award in Literature in 2011. His latest collection of poems, The Journeymen, has been nominated for a PEN Western States Award, a Before Columbus Foundation Award, and poems from the book have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. www. jamesjay.org

ALLAN KORNBLUM began his publishing career in 1970 with Toothpaste, a mimeographed magazine. Shortly after studying typography at the University of Iowa, he began publishing letterpress books and pamphlets under the Toothpaste Press imprint, but by 1984, the tube had been squeezed dry. He reorganized as Coffee House Press, a nonprofit literary publishing house, moved to Minnesota, and began using contemporary technology for book production. Under his leadership, Coffee House has become one of the most highly regarded independent literary presses in the country, with a multicultural backlist of titles that are rapidly gaining the status of modern classics. In 1997, he received an American Book Award for his contributions to literature and publishing. www.coffeehousepress.org

GREG KOSMICKI is a poet and social worker living in Omaha, Nebraska. He founded The Backwaters Press in 1997 which he edits and publishes. Books from The Backwaters Press have won more than 10 Nebraska book awards for poetry, anthology, and book and cover design. The Backwaters Prize winner selected by Philip Levine for 2004, No Accident by Aaron Anstett, won The Nebraska Book Award for Poetry, the Balcones Award from Austin Community College for the best book of poetry published by a small press in the US that year, and was a finalist for the Colorado Book Awards. Greg’s own poetry has been published in numerous magazines, both print and online, including Chiron Review, Connecticut Review, Cortland Review, New Letters, Nimrod, Paris Review, and Poetry East. He received artist’s fellowships for his poetry from the Nebraska Arts Council 2000 and 2006. He is the author of three books and 8 chapbooks of poems. Two of the poems from his book from Word Press, Some Hero of the Past, and one poem from his newest chapbook from Pudding House Publications, New Route in the Dream, have been selected by Garrison Keillor and read by him on The Writer's Almanac. Marigolds, his seventh chapbook of poems, was recently published by Black Star Press. http://backwaterpress.com

ANN PATTY graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1974, Magna Cum Laude in Comparative Literature.  She immediately moved to New York City to work in publishing, which she has done ever since.  She began as a receptionist at Knopf, had a brief stint as an editor with Maurice Girodias at Olympia Press, then buckled down as an assistant at Dell.  In 1976 she moved to Pocket Books as a Senior Editor, where she discovered VC Andrews, one of the biggest successes of the paperback original revolution.  In 1982 she became the youngest editor ever to be given her own imprint when she founded Poseidon Press (an imprint of Simon & Schuster) where she was Publisher and Editorial Director. In 1993 she moved to Crown Publishers, first as Editor at Large, then as Editorial Director.  From 2000-2008, she was Executive Editor at Harcourt.    In 2009, she became a free lance editor, co-writer and book doctor.  She lives in Rhinebeck, New York. www.annpatty.com

KATHERINE RUSSELL RICH  is an award-winning writer and magazine editor who currently works full time as a writer. Her first book was the The Red Devil: To hell with cancer and back (Crown, 1999).   She has just finished a second book, for Houghton Mifflin. about a year she spent in India learning to speak Hindi. Tentative title: “Unspeakable: Life in Another Language,” it intertwines personal narrative from India with reporting on the neurobiology of language acquisition. Slated publication date: spring of 2009.   As a journalist, her list of recent publications includes: The New York Times, the Sunday New York Times Magazine, Vogue, the Washington Post, O magazine, Elle, British Conde Nast Traveler, NPR,  Salon. She has translated Hindi poetry for The Literary Review.  Rich has been the recipient of a number of awards and fellowships. In 2002, she was a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars and in 2001, she was a Hindi Language Fellow at the American Institute of Indian Studies in Rajastan, India. An excerpt from her forthcoming book won a New York Foundation for the Arts award for non-fiction in 2005. She has had several residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo.  She’s on the MFA faculty in non fiction in the low-residency program at Lesley College. In addition, every spring, she teaches a seminar in nonfiction to doctors at Harvard. She’s also lectured at Bennington College, the University of Chicago Medical School, Goucher College and Princeton.  In a previous life, she worked on the staff side at magazines, as an assigning editor at a range of places including GQ, Allure, Seventeen, and Real Simple. Ms. Rich is a stand-up storyteller and advisory council member at the Moth, a widely acclaimed non-profit arts organization that stages storytelling nights. One of the stories she told, “What Goes Up,” is now out on CD.

VICTORIA SKURNICK came to Levine Greenberg after being at The Book-of-the Month Club for almost twenty years.  As Editor-in-Chief, she relished the opportunity to devour every kind of book, from the finest literary fiction to Yiddish for Dogs.  Anne Tyler, John LeCarre, Amy Tan, Tom Wolfe, Stephen King, Michael Lewis, Lee Child, RoddyDoyle, Alice Sebold, Tracy Kidder, Julia Child and Susan Elizabeth Phillips are just a few of the authors that make her deaf and blind to anyone around her when she's reading. Victoria's other addiction besides reading is music. She has sung in many choirs in New York City and spent a few ostensibly happy years singing rock in groups like Big and the Evolution. No, you haven't heard of it-if you had, she wouldn't be an agent. She also is the co-author (with Cynthia Katz) of seven novels written by "Cynthia Victor." Raised in New Rochelle, NY, Victoria went to the University of Wisconsin where she studied political science with an emphasis on constitutional law, a subject that still fascinates her. Neither adventurous nor peripatetic, she has remained within a 20-mile radius of home since her day of birth. www.levinegreenberg.com/victoria-skurnick

Born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, MILES WAGGENER studied Spanish and English at Northern Arizona University before earning an MFA from the University of Montana, where he received the Richard Hugo Memorial Scholarship.  His poems have appeared in such journals as Crazyhorse, the Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Green Mountains Review, Gulf Coast, the Mid-American Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review.  He won an individual creative writing fellowship from the Arizona Commission on the Arts in 2003 and a prize from the Academy of American Poets at the University of Montana.  Before joining the faculty of the Writer’s Workshop at The University of Nebraska at Omaha, he taught creative writing and Latin American literature at Prescott College in Prescott, Arizona.  His collection Phoenix Suites won the Washington Prize and was published in 2003 by The Word Works.  He lives in Omaha with his wife and fellow poet, Megan Gannon.  

CHARLES HARPER WEBB, M.F.A., Ph.D. has published eight books of poetry, including Reading the Water, Liver, Tulip Farms & Leper Colonies, Hot Popsicles, and Amplified Dog.  Shadow Ball: New and Selected Poems was published in 2009 by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which will publish Webb’s next collection, What Things Are Made Of, in 2012.  Webb's awards in poetry include the Morse Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Felix Pollock Prize, and the Benjamin Saltman Prize.  His poems have appeared in many distinguished journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Tin House, Poets of the New Century, Best American Poetry, and The Pushcart Prize. A former professional rock musician and psychotherapist, he is the editor of Stand Up Poetry: An Expanded Anthology, and recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award, a fellowship from the Guggenheim foundation, and the CSULB Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award.   He directs the MFA Program at California State University, Long Beach.

WANG PING was born in China and came to USA in 1986. Her publications include American Visa (short stories, 1994), Foreign Devil (novel, 1996), Of Flesh and Spirit (poetry, 1998), The Magic Whip (poetry, 2003), The Last Communist Virgin (stories, 2007), All Roads to Joy: Memories along the Yangtze (forthcoming 2012), all from Coffee House. New Generation: Poetry from China Today (1999), an anthology she edited and co-translated, is published by Hanging Loose. Flash Cards: Poems by Yu Jian, co-translation with Ron Padgett, 2010 from Zephyr. Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China (2000, University of Minnesota Press) won the Eugene Kayden Award for the Best Book in Humanities, and in 2002, Random House published its paperback. The Last Communist Virgin won 2008 Minnesota Book Award and Asian American Studies Award. She had two photography and multi-media exhibitions--“Behind the Gate: After the Flooding of the Three Gorges” at Janet Fine Art Gallery, Macalester College, 2007, and “All Roads to Lhasa” at Banfill-Lock Cultural Center, 2008. She collaborated with the British filmmaker Isaac Julien on Ten Thousand Waves, a film installation about the illegal Chinese immigration in London. She is the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council of the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bush Artist Fellowship, Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and the McKnight Artist Fellowship.