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

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.

(Playwright in Residence) Benjamin Graber has been a hippie doctor, a sex doctor, a psychiatrist, and a neurobiologist. 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 served for many years on the faculty at the University of Nebraska Medical School. During his years in medical academics, he authored academic articles, book chapters, abstracts, and national and international meeting presentations, including in Italy, Mexico, Israel, and Venezuela. His co-authored non-fiction text, Woman’s Orgasm, remained in print for thirty-three years, and his edited text, Circumvaginal Musculature and Sexual Function is in its twenty-eighth year of continuous publication. 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 first Great Plains Theatre Conference in 2006; every year since, the conference has selected one of his plays for a highly competitive Playlab staged reading. His 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. 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. His newest full-length play, Heternormativity, will be featured summer of 2010 at a workshop and reading at the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis where he was appointed a Core Apprentice in 2010. In addition to playwriting, he has served as director, assistant director or dramaturg for many theatre productions. He is currently the Playwright in Residence at the University of Nebraska MFA in Writing program. 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

ANNA MONARDO’s  novel Falling In Love With Natassia, was published by Doubleday in May 2006. Her first novel, The Courtyard of Dreams (Doubleday, 1993; reprinted by iUniverse.com, 2000), has been translated into German, Norwegian, and Dutch. Her stories, essays, and poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Sun, Indiana Review, Redbook, Other Voices, Clackamas Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, McCall’s  and anthologized in A Different Plain: Contemporary Nebraska Fiction Writers (University of Nebraska Press), The Dream Book Anthology of Writing by Italian-American Women (Schocken Books) and The Good Parts: The Best Erotic Writing in Modern Fiction (Berkley Books). Her fiction has also been included in the NPR reading series, “Selected Shorts.” She is Associate Professor and Chair of the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where she has been awarded several University Creative Research grants. Before moving to Nebraska, Monardo taught in the MFA Program at Eastern Washington University and in various writing programs in New York City, including the Writer’s Voice of the West Side Y, New York University School of Continuing Education, and Marymount Manhattan College Courses for Adults. Originally from Pittsburgh, she received her BA from St. Mary’s College (Notre Dame, Indiana) and her MFA from Columbia University. She has also worked as an editor at McCall's, Time, and Random House. She is a 2000 and 2003 recipient of Merit Awards from the Nebraska Arts Council.

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

ELIZABETH POWELL’s first book of poems, The Republic of Self, won the New Issues Poetry Prize. Her recent work has appeared in Ploughshares, Missouri Review, Post Road, Alaska Quarterly Review, among others. She has received grants from the Vermont Council on the Arts, as well as a residency from Yaddo. Her essay “Infidelities” appeared in My Mother Married Your Father, an anthology of essays on step-families, published by WW Norton. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Elizabeth teaches at the University of Vermont, is poetry editor of Green Mountains Review,and lives with her family in Burlington, Vermont.

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.

SUE WILLIAM SILVERMAN’s first memoir, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You (University of Georgia Press), won the Association of Writers & Writing Programs award series in creative nonfiction and is in its 6th printing.  Her second memoir, Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey Through Sexual Addiction (W. W. Norton),was produced for a Lifetime Television Original Movie.  Her books have been translated into Chinese, German, Japanese, and Norwegian.  Her poetry collection is Hieroglyphics in Neon (Orchises Press).  In 2005, two of Sue’s essays won national contests: one with Hotel Amerika, the other with the Mid-American Review.  Individual essays, short stories, and poems have appeared in such places as Prairie Schooner, Chicago Tribune, Detroit Free Press, Redbook, Louisville Review, The Caribbean Writer, Brevity, Nebraska Review, Charleston Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Writer’s Chronicle.   She is associate editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction and teaches in the MFA in Writing program at  Vermont  College.  As a professional speaker, she has appeared on many nationally syndicated radio and TV programs including “Anderson Cooper 360” (CNN), “To the Contrary” (PBS), a John Stossel Special on ABC-TV, Montel Williams, and both the U. S. and Canadian Discovery Channels.  She is featured in the award-winning documentary “Pursuit of Pleasure.”   For more information please visit www.suewilliamsilverman.com

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.