FictionAddiction

Mike Albo is an author and performer who lives and loves in Brooklyn, NY. His novel “Hornito” was published in 2000 (HarperCollins). His second novel, “The Underminer: The Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life,” co-written by Virginia Heffernan, was published through Bloomsbury USA in 2005. His novella, The Junket appeared as a Kindle Single in 2011. He has been performing as a comedian and monologuist since 1995, and many of his acts can be found on YouTube. He is also in the comedy trio, Unitard, appearing on Fridays at Casa Mezcal at 8pm!

Allison Amend was born in Chicago, Illinois, on a day when the Cubs beat the Mets 2-0. Allison attended the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, receiving a Maytag and a Teaching/Writing Fellowship. Allison’s debut short story collection, Things That Pass for Love (OV/Dzanc Books, 2008) won a bronze Independent Publisher’s award. Stations West, a historical novel, was published by Louisiana State University Press as part of its Yellow Shoe Fiction series in March 2010 and was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Oklahoma Book Award. Her second novel, A Nearly Perfect Copy was published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday in April 2013. Allison lives in New York City, where she teaches creative writing at Lehman College in the Bronx and for Red Earth MFA.

Mona Awad‘s fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, Joyland, St. Petersburg Review, The Walrus and elsewhere.  She is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at Brown University.

A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria in 1979. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short stories have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His second collection of stories Love Is Power, Or Something Like That was published in 2013 by Graywolf Press. He lives in Nigeria.

Sara Batkie was born in Seattle, grew up in Connecticut and Iowa, and moved to New York in 2008 to pursue her MFA in Fiction with NYU. Her work has been published in Gulf Coast and LIT magazine and received mention in Best American Short Stories 2011. Currently she lives in Brooklyn where she volunteers for One Story and recently completed her first novel.

Marie-Helene Bertino’s collection of short stories Safe As Houses received The 2012 Iowa Short Fiction Award, judged by Jim Shepard, and was published in October of 2012.  She has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize four times, receiving the award in 2007 and a Special Mention in 2011.  She has taught for The Gotham Writer’s Workshop and One Story’s Emerging Writer’s Workshop and was an Emerging Writer Fellow at NYC’s Center for Fiction.  She hails from Philly, lives in Brooklyn, and has worked as a muralist, diner waitress, receptionist, and music writer. Currently, she is a biographer for people living with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI).  For more information, visit www.mariehelenebertino.com.

Alethea Black’s debut collection of short stories, I Knew You’d Be Lovely (Broadway Books/Random House), has been called “smart … full of heart” by Joan Silber and “downright brilliant” by Robert Olen Butler. Her work has won the Arts & Letters Prize, has been cited as distinguished in The Best American Short Stories, and has been read at venues around the country by such talents as Campbell Scott and Michael Cerveris.

Born in 1982, Stefan Merrill Block grew up in Plano, Texas. His first book, The Story of Forgetting, was an international bestseller and the winner of Best First Fiction at the Rome International Festival of Literature, the 2008 Merck Serono Literature Prize and the 2009 Fiction Award from The Writers’ League of Texas. The Story of Forgetting was also a finalist for the debut fiction awards from IndieBound, Salon du Livre and The Center for Fiction. Following the publication of his second novel, The Storm at the Door, Stefan was awarded The University of Texas Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, as well as residencies at The Santa Maddalena Foundation and Castello Malaspina di Fosdinovo in Italy. Stefan lives in Brooklyn.

Will Boast was born in England and grew up in Ireland and Wisconsin. His story collection, Power Ballads, won the 2011 Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for a California Book Award. His fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New American Voices, Virginia Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train, The American Scholar, andThe New York Times, among other publications. He’s been a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford and a Charles Pick Fellow at the University of East Anglia in the UK. His memoir, Epilogue, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton Co/Liveright and Granta Books.

Christopher Bollen is a writer who lives in New York City. He regularly writes about art, literature, and culture, and his first novel, Lightning People, will be published in Septemberl 2011. He is currently the Editor at Large at Interview Magazine.

Polly Duff Bresnick’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Brooklyn Rail, elimae, LIT, trnsfr, and The Fiddleback. An excerpt of Old Gus Eats, her visual (mis)translation of Homer’s The Odyssey, was recently published as a chapbook by Publishing Genius Press. She is the host and curator of the monthly Brooklyn reading series Writers Reading to Writers Listening to Writers Reading to Writers. Her novel, Frank, a loose retelling of the Frankenstein myth needs a home.

Amy Brill is a writer and producer. Her articles, essays, and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous publications including One Story, The Common, Redbook, Real Simple, Salon, Guernica, and Time Out New York. As a broadcast journalist, she received a George Foster Peabody Award for writing MTV’s The Social History of HIV, and she researched, wrote, or produced over a dozen other projects for the network’s pro-social initiatives. She has also produced online projects fostering public dialogue on arts, culture, and society for PBS, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and other organizations. Her debut novel The Movement of Stars came out in April of this year. A native New Yorker, Amy lives in Brooklyn with her husband. They have two small daughters, neither of whom can yet tie her own shoes.

Ryan Britt’s writing has appeared with Nerve.com, Good.com, Opium Magazine, Clarkesworld Magazine, Soon Quarterly and elsewhere. He is the staff writer for science fiction/fantasy blog Tor.com, and teaches at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop. He lives in Brooklyn.

Victoria Brown was born in Trinidad and at sixteen came alone to New York, where she worked as a full-time nanny for several years. She majored in English at Vassar College before attending the University of Warwick in Coventry, England. Eventually, she returned to New York, where she taught English at LaGuardia Community College. She is now completing her MFA at Hunter College. Victoria lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two young children. She has a part-time babysitter in her employ.

Julie Buntin is from northern Michigan. She attended NYU’s MFA program, where she was an adjunct instructor and the recipient of a Starworks Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in Cosmopolitan, Sonora Review, The Rumpus, and One Teen Story. Her novel isn’t done yet.

Kenneth Calhoun has published stories in the Paris Review, Tin House, Fence, St. Petersburg Review and elsewhere. His story “Nightblooming” was awarded a PEN/O. Henry Fiction prize and was also selected for the New Stories from the South anthology in 2011. BLACK MOON, his first novel, will be published in March by Hogarth.

Caitlin Campbell grew up in Minnesota and lives in Brooklyn. She is completing her MFA at Brooklyn College. Her work has appeared in Weird Tales, the Berkeley Fiction Review, the Jersey Devil Press, and elsewhere.

Susan Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, and her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. With David Remnick she co-edited the anthology Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker.  Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award.  In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, Pete Wells, and their sons.

Joshua Cohen is the author of three novels, Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, A Heaven of Others, and most recently, Witz, which was named a Best Book of 2010 by The Village Voice. He has published three story collections, most recently Four New Messages, which was named a Best Book of 2012 by The New Yorker. His stories and essays have appeared in in Harper’s, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, Bookforum, The Believer, The New York Observer, The London Review of Books, Guernica Magazine, and elsewhere.

Teju Cole is a writer, art historian, photographer, and currently Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College. Born in the US (1975) to Nigerian parents, he was raised in Nigeria and now lives in Brooklyn. He is the author of two books, a novella, Every Day is for the Thief, and a novel, Open City, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New York City Book Award for Fiction, the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Internationaler Literaturpreis, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and the Ondaatje Prize of the Royal Society of Literature. Cole is a contributor to the New York Times, the New Yorker, Qarrtsiluni, the Atlantic, Granta, Aperture, Transition, A Public Space, etc. Contributing editor at the New Inquiry. Currently at work on a book-length non-fiction narrative of Lagos. Photography exhibited in Panjim, Goa and Ithaca, New York.

Catherine Chung was born in Evanston, IL and grew up in New York, New Jersey, and Michigan. She studied math at the University of Chicago and worked at a think tank in Santa Monica before going to Cornell for her MFA. She is the author of the novel Forgotten Country, a Granta New voice, and a fiction editor at Guernica Magazine. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Rumpus, and Epoch Magazine, among others. She currently lives in New York City.

Michael Cunningham is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award & Pulitzer Prize), Specimen Days, and By Nightfall, as well as the non-fiction book, Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. His new novel, The Snow Queen, will be published in May of 2014. He lives in New York, and teaches at Yale University.

Steve Danziger is managing editor of Fiction magazine, teacher at City College, member of the Terranova Theater Collective, volunteer at the Housing Works Bookstore, and loiterer at the Hungarian Pastry Shop.

Jonathan Dee is the author of five previous novels, most recently The Privileges, which was both a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize and winner of the 2011 Prix Fitzgerald. He is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, a National Magazine Award–nominated literary critic forHarper’s, and a former senior editor of the Paris Review. He teaches in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University and the New School. He is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Lisa Dierbeck is a co-founder of Mischief&Mayhem Publishing, an independent press dubbed “the book industry’s new danger brigade” by The New York Observer.  She is the author of the novels The Autobiography of Jenny X and One Pill Makes You Smaller, a New York Times Notable Book.  She’s a frequent contributor to such publications as The Boston Globe, Glamour,The New York Observer, The New York Times Book Review, O, the Oprah Magazine, and Time Out New York.  Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Dierbeck’s work appears in such anthologies as Heavy Rotation: 20 Authors on the Albums that Changed Their Lives and O’s Guide to Life: The Best of O, the Oprah Magazine.   With Mischief&Mayhem, she curates a monthly reading series at Le Poisson Rouge, “Unprintable,” to bring attention to high quality fiction that takes risks and raises eyebrows.

Matt Dojny is an artist, designer, and writer who lives in Brooklyn, NY. He’s been published in A Public Space and in the upcoming Smith Magazine collection “The Moment.” The Festival of Earthly Delights is his first novel.

Benjamin Dolson is a writer from Michigan. He was a finalist in this year’s The L Magazine Literary Upstart Competition. He lives in Brooklyn, NY with his lovely wife.

Stephen Elliott is the director of the movie About Cherry. In 2013 he directed an adaptation of his novel Happy Baby. He is the the author of seven books including The Adderall Diaries and the novel Happy Baby. His writing has been featured in Esquire, The New York Times, The Believer, GQ, Best American Non-Required Reading 2005 and 2007, Best American Erotica, and Best Sex Writing 2006. He is also the founding editor of the popular online literary magazine The Rumpus.

Patricia Engel is the author of the acclaimed books, Vida and It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris. Vida, her debut, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2010, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Fiction Award, New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Barnes & Noble, Latina Magazine, and Los Angeles Weekly. Her short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, A Public Space, Boston Review, Guernica, Harvard Review, and The Normal School, among many other publications and anthologies. Most recently, she is the recipient of a 2014 fellowship in prose from the National Endowment for the Arts. Born to Colombian parents and raised in New Jersey, Patricia earned her undergraduate degree at New York University and her MFA at Florida International University. She lives in Miami.

Alison Espach is the author of The Adults, a  New York Time’s Editor’s Choice, Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writer Pick, and an Amazon Best Book of 2011. Her short story “Someone’s Uncle” was published as an e-book by Scribner in 2011. She received her MFA in Fiction from Washington University in St. Louis, where she taught creative writing. Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, Five Chapters, Del Sol Review, and Sentence, The Daily Beast, Glamour, and others. She is currently teaching in New York City.

Joshua Ferris is the bestselling author of three novels, Then We Came to the End, The Unnamed and To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. He was a finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the Barnes and Noble Discover Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and was named one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40”writers in 2010. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, and Best American Short Stories. He lives in New York.

Ru Freeman completed her Masters in Labor Relations at the University of Colombo, and worked in the field of American and international humanitarian assistance and workers’ rights. Her political writing has appeared in English and in translation. Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in VQR, Guernica, World Literature Today and elsewhere. She is a contributing editorial board member of the Asian American Literary Review, and a fellow of the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is the author of the novel A Disobedient Girl (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2009), which was long-listed for the DCS Prize for South Asian Literature, and translated into several languages. Her new novel, On Sal Mal Lane, is published by Graywolf Press in 2013. She calls both Sri Lanka and America home and writes about the people and countries underneath her skin.

Nell Freudenberger is the author of the novels The Newlyweds and The Dissident and the story collection Lucky Girls. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library, she was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40.”

Seth Fried is a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer, whose stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, One Story, Tin House, Vice Magazine, and others. His debut short story collection, The Great Frustration, was just named by Poets & Writers as one of the best debuts of the summer.”

Joshua Furst is the author of the novel The Sabotage Cafe and the story collection Short People.  His fiction and non-fiction have been published in The Chicago Tribune, Esquire, Salon, Nerve and Conjunctions, among many other places.  He’s a frequent contributor to the Jewish Daily Forward and he teaches fiction writing at The New School.

David Gilbert is the author of the story collection Remote Feed and the novel The Normals. His latest novel & Sons came out in July of 2013. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, and Bomb. He lives in New York with his wife and three children.

Jennifer Gilmore is the author of two novels, Golden Country, a 2006 New York Times Notable Book, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Jewish Book Award, and Something Red , New York Times Notable Book of 2010.  Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in magazines and journals including Allure, Bomb, BookForum, the Los Angeles Times, Nerve, the New York Times, the New York Times Book Review, Salon, SELF, Tin House, Vogue and the Washington Post, and her personal essays have also been included in several anthologies including More New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of the New York Times, The Friend Who Got Away, Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave and How to Spell Chanukah. She has been a MacDowell Colony fellow and has taught writing and literature at the Cornell University, Barnard College, Eugene Lang College at the New School and New York University.  Her new novel, The Mothers, will be published by Scribner in April 2013.

William Giraldi is the author of the novel Busy Monsters (Norton, 2011) and is Fiction Editor for AGNI at Boston University. His nonfiction and fiction have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Georgia Review, Bookforum, Southern Review, The Believer, Kenyon Review, Poets & Writers, Yale Review, The American Scholar, Antioch Review, TriQuarterly, and Salmagundi.  His essay on amateur bodybuilding, “Freaky Beasts,” received a Pushcart Prize and was listed among Most Notable Essays in Best American Essays 2010. His essay “The Physics of Speed” was a finalist for a 2011 National Magazine Award. Giraldi lives in Boston with his wife and son.

Myla Goldberg is the bestselling author of Bee Season, Wickett’s Remedy, and The False Friend, as well as a children’s book and an essay collection.  Her short stories have appeared in Harper’s. She sings and plays accordion and banjo in the Brooklyn art-punk band, The Walking Hellos. Myla teaches writing at several MFA programs, and leads private fiction workshops in and around New York City.

Jennifer Gonnerman has been writing about “how the other half lives” for the past 15 years. She is a contributing editor at New York magazine, a contributing writer for Mother Jones, and the author of Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett.

Casey Gonzalez is a graduate of Vassar College. She is currently editorial assisting at PEN America and writing in her free time. She has self-published a comic called Boys I have Blown and Other Bad Love Experiences.

David Goodwillie is the author of the acclaimed novel AMERICAN SUBVERSIVE.  Hailed as “genuinely thrilling” by The New Yorker, and “a triumphant work of fiction” by the AP, it was a New York Times Notable Book of 2010, and a Vanity Fair and Publisher’s Weekly top ten Spring debut.  He is also the author of the memoir SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME, for which he was named one of the “Best New Writers of 2006″ by members of the PEN American Center. Goodwillie writes about books for The Daily Beast, and his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, including New York, Men’s Health, Black Book, The New York Times, The New York Observer, and The New York Post. He has played professional baseball, worked as a private investigator, and been an expert at Sotheby’s auction house. A graduate of Kenyon College, he lives in New York City.

Ben Greenman is an editor at the New Yorker and the author of several acclaimed books of fiction, including Superbad, Please Step Back, and What He’s Poised To Do. He lives in Brooklyn.

Ben Hale is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. He received a University of Iowa Provost’s Fellowship to write The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, which also went on to win a Michener-Copernicus Award. He has been a night shift baker, a trompe l’oeil painter, a cartoonist, an illustrator and a technical writer. He grew up in Colorado and now lives in New York.

James Hannaham’s first novel, God Says No, was named an honor book by the Stonewall Book Awards. His stories have appeared in The Literary Review, Open City, McSweeney’s, Fence, JMWW, and One Story. His criticism has appeared in The Village Voice, Out, Salon.com, and in Best African American Essays 2009. He teaches at Pratt, The New School and Columbia University.

Joshua Henkin is the author of the novels Matrimony, a New York Times Notable Book, and Swimming Across the Hudson, a Los Angeles Times Notable Book. His new novel, The World Without You, has just been published by Pantheon. His short stories have been published widely, cited for distinction in Best American Short Stories, and broadcast on NPR’s “Selected Shorts.” He lives in Brooklyn, NY, and directs the MFA program in Fiction Writing at Brooklyn College.

Tom Hopkins is a graduate of NYU’s Creative Writing Program. His short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in the print magazines and lit journals Fence, River Styx, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Indiana Review, Sonora Review, The L Magazine, One Story, Quick Fiction, and Opium Magazine; the online lit journals (and online editions of journals) Yankee Pot Roast, failbetter.com, Conjunctions, and Pindeldyboz; and in the anthology Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader. He has also written for Bookforum, Poets & Writers, and the Los Angeles Times. He has been a fellow at the Albee Foundation and the Ucross Foundation; a finalist for the 2011 Calvino Prize, a finalist for the Sonora Review Short-Short Story Contest; and a nominee for the 2007 edition of the Best New American Voices anthology.

As a child, Nadia Kalman emigrated with her family from the former Soviet Union. Formerly a teacher and assistant principal, she now works as a writer-in-the-schools with Teachers & Writers Collaborative in New York City. She was a two-time fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and has published stories in Subtropics, the Canadian magazine The Walrus, and elsewhere. Her first novel, The Cosmopolitans, won the Emerging Writer Award from Moment magazine and was a finalist for the Rohr Prize in Jewish Literature. Nadia recently received a 2012 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Jessica Francis Kane was born in Berkeley, CA, grew up in Ann Arbor, MI, and graduated from Yale. Her first short story collection, Bending Heaven, was published in the US (Counterpoint, 2002) and the UK (Chatto & Windus, 2003). Awards and honors for her work include the Lawrence Foundation Prize from the Michigan Quarterly Review, fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her stories have been presented on BBC Radio 4 and published many places, including Virginia Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, McSweeney’s, The Yale Review, A Public Space, Narrative, and Granta. Her essays and humor pieces have appeared in Salon, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and The Morning News, where she is a contributing writer. Her first novel, The Report, was published by Graywolf Press in September 2010 and was a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, the Indie Booksellers’ Choice Award, the Grub Street Book Prize for Fiction, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Her new short story collection, This Close, was published on March 5, 2013, by Graywolf Press.

Miles Klee writes for Vanity Fair, Lapham’s Quarterly and BlackBook Magazine. His short fiction has appeared in The Collagist, Unstuck, McSweeney’s andContrary. His debut novel, Ivyland, is a finalist in The Morning News‘ 2013 Tournament of Books. The Wall Street Journal likened it to “J.G. Ballard zapped with a thousand volts of electricity,” while Publishers Weekly noted that “Klee is undoubtedly a formidable talent in the making—he can make sentences crackle with an intensity and humor not seen since David Foster Wallace.” He lives in Manhattan with the screenwriter C.F. Lederer, his wife.

Amitava Kumar is a writer and journalist. He was born in Ara, and grew up in the nearby town of Patna, famous for its corruption, crushing poverty and delicious mangoes. Kumar is the author of several books of non-fiction and a novel, including Nobody Does the Right Thing, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb and his most recent book A Matter of Rats. He lives in Poughkeepsie, in upstate New York, where he is Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English at Vassar College.

Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist (2002), Transmission (2004), My Revolutions(2007) and Gods Without Men (2011), as well as a short story collection, Noise (2006). His work has been translated into twenty-one languages and won him prizes including the Somerset Maugham award, the Betty Trask prize of the Society of Authors, a Pushcart prize and a British Book Award. In 2003 Granta named him one of its 20 best young British novelists. His short stories and journalism have appeared inThe New York Times, Guardian, The New Yorker, Financial Times, Times of India, Wired and New Statesman. He lives in New York City.

Aryn Kyle grew up in Grand Junction, Colorado. Her debut novel The God of Animals (Scribner, 2007) was an international bestseller and the winner of an American Library Association’s Alex Award, a PNBA Award, an MPIBA Award, and others. The God of Animals was chosen as a Book Sense Pick, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writer’s title, and was named by Amazon as the number fiction debut of 2007. Her short story collection Boys and Girls Like You and Me was published by Scribner in April 2010. Aryn’s short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Best American Short Stories 2007, Best New American Voices 2005, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award and a National Magazine Award in fiction. She lives in New York City.

Catherine Lacey is the author of NOBODY IS EVER MISSING. She has recieved fellowships from NYFA, Columbia University and will be in residence this fall at the Omi International Arts Center. Recent work has appeared in The New York Times, Guernica and the Granta “New Voices” series.

Paul La Farge is the author of four books: the novels The Artist of the Missing (FSG, 1999), Haussmann, or the Distinction (FSG, 2001) and Luminous Airplanes (FSG, 2011), and The Facts of Winter (McSweeney’s Books, 2005), a collection of imaginary dreams. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bard Fiction Prize, and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is currently working on luminousairplanes.com, a large web-based fiction.

Kiese Laymon is the author of the forthcoming novels My Name is City, All Things Considered, Long Division and a book of essays called On Parole. Laymon has written essays and stories for numerous publications including Longman’s Hip Hop Reader, Mythium and the journal, “Politics and Culture”. He writes the blog Cold Drank which you can find at Kieselaymon.com and currently teaches English, Africana Studies and Creative Writing at Vassar College.

Victor LaValle is the author of the short story collection Slapboxing with Jesus, three novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, and The Devil in Silver, and an ebook only novella,Lucretia and the Kroons. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Whiting Writers’ Award, a United States Artists Ford Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at Columbia University.

Zachary Lazar is the author of four books, including the novel Sway (2008), the memoir Evening’s Empire: The Story of My Father’s Murder (2009), and the novel I Pity the Poor Immigrant (2014).  His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, NPR’s All Things Considered, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere.  Lazar is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University.  He lives in New Orleans, where he is on the faculty at Tulane University.

Chang-Rae Lee is the author of the forthcoming novel On Such a Full Sea. He is also the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, A Gesture Life, Aloft, and The Surrendered. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.

J. Robert Lennon is the author of a story collection, Pieces For The Left Hand, and seven novels, including Mailman, Castle, and Familiar. He teaches writing at Cornell University.

Mitch Levenberg has published essays and short fiction in such journals as The Common Review, Fiction, The New Delta Review, Fine Madness, The Saint Ann’s Review, Confluence, The Cream City Review, BigCityLit.com, and others. His collection of stories, Principles of Uncertainty and Other Constants was published in March 2006. His essays “Tears For Lear,” “I Interrupt this Memoir,” “China Memoir,” and “The Smell of Cinnamon Buns” were published by Middlebrow Magazine.com. “Tears For Lear” was selected as one of Middlebrow’s Best of 2011. Two of his stories “The Pen” and “The Line” appear in the current issue of The Same Press magazine and his story “Jim’s Knife” will appear this Spring. His memoir on adopting his daughter from China entitled The Sixth Happiness, will be published later this Spring.

Kelly Link is the author of three collections of short stories, Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters. Her short stories have won three Nebulas, a Hugo, and a World Fantasy Award. She was born in Miami, Florida, and once won a free trip around the world by answering the question “Why do you want to go around the world?” (“Because you can’t go through it.”) Link and her family live in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she and her husband, Gavin J. Grant, run Small Beer Press, and play ping-pong. In 1996 they started the occasional zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy, Famous Builder, The Burning House, and two upcoming books: Unbuilt Projects (Four Way Books, 2012) and The Narrow Door (Graywolf Press, 2014). His work appears in Tin House, Ploughshares, Fence, The Rumpus, The Iowa Review, Story Quarterly, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. He’s taught in the writing programs at Cornell, NYU, and Sarah Lawrence. He’s currently the New Voices Professor in the MFA Program at Rutgers-Camden.

Robert Lopez is the author of two novels, Part of the World and Kamby Bolongo Mean River, which was named one of 25 important books of the decade by HTML Giant, and a story collection, Asunder. He has taught at The New School, Pratt Institute, Columbia University and The Solstice MFA Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College and was a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in fiction.

Fiona Maazel is the author of the novel, Last Last Chance. She is winner of the Bard prize for 2009 and a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35″ honoree for 2008. Her work has appeared in Bomb, The Common, Fence, The Mississippi Review, The New York Times Book Review, Tin House, Salon, N+1, and The Yale Review. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, and just finished work on her next novel, Woke Up Lonely. She is reading at Fiction Addiction THIS MONTH and answered some questions for me on writing, teaching and her new novel.

Alexander Maksik is the author of the novels You Deserve Nothing and A Marker to Measure Drift, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2013. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Harper’s, Tin House, Harvard Review, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Condé Nast Traveler, Salon and Narrative Magazine, among other publications and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is the recipient of fellowships from the Truman Capote Literary Trust and The Corporation of Yaddo.

Ayana Mathis is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a recipient of the 2014-15 New York Public Library’s Cullman Center Fellowship.  THE TWELVE TRIBES OF HATTIE, her first novel, a New York Times Bestseller and a  2013 New York Times Notable Book of the Year 2013, was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as the second selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0.  Ayana was the 2011-12 Michener-Copernicus Fellow.  She taught fiction writing as visiting faculty at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in Spring 2013, and is currently teaching at The Writer’s Foundry MFA Program at St. Joseph’s College, Brooklyn.

Victoria Matsui works at Poets & Writers Magazine and occasionally at BookCourt. She has been published in online anthology Plain China: Best Undergraduate Writing 2010, and will be published in 92Y online publication Podium. She lives in Brooklyn!

Ben Marcus is the author of five books of fiction: Notable American Women, The Father Costume, The Age of Wire and String, and  The Flame Alphabet. His new book, Leaving the Sea, was published by Knopf in January, 2014. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, The Paris Review, The Believer, The New York Times, Salon, McSweeney’s, Time, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. He is the editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and for several years he was the fiction editor of Fence. He is now the fiction editor atThe American Reader. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, a Creative Capital Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and three Pushcart Prizes. He is a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow, and in the fall of 2013 he will be a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He taught at Brown University for several years before joining the faculty at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

Halimah Marcus is Co-Editor of Electric Literature, a digital publisher based out of Brooklyn, and its weekly fiction magazine, Recommended Reading. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, One Story, Sports Illustrated, and elsewhere. She has a MFA from Brooklyn College.

Sara Majka earned her MFA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and was a fiction fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Her stories have appeared in journals such as A Public Space, PEN America, and The Massachusetts Review. She lives in New York where she adjuncts at Fordham University.

Patrick McGrath is the author of seven novels and two short story collections, including his novel from 2000, Martha Peake: A Novel of the Revolution, which won the Premio Flaiano Prize in Italy, his collection of linked short stories Ghost Town: Tales of Manhatta Then and Now and his latest novel Trauma, which was released in 2008. His novels The Grotesque, Spider and Asylum were turned into films. He teaches in the MFA program at The New School.

Lincoln Michel‘s work appears in Electric Literature, Tin House, NOON, The Believer, Unstuck, and elsewhere. He is a founding editor of Gigantic and the coeditor of Gigantic Worlds, a forthcoming anthology of science flash fiction. You can find him online at lincolnmichel.com.

Ann Napolitano is the author of the novels A Good Hard Look and Within Arm’s Reach.  She received an MFA from New York University; she teaches fiction writing for Brooklyn College’s MFA program, New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies and for Gotham Writers’ Workshop.  She lives in New York City with her husband and two children.

Leigh Newman’s memoir Still Points North is forthcoming from Dial Press in spring 2013.She is the Deputy Editor of Oprah.com where she writes about books, life, happiness, survival, and—on rare, lucky days—food.  Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in One Story, Tin House, The New York Times Modern Love and City sections, Fiction, New York Tyrant, O The Oprah Magazine, Oprah.com, Condé Nast Brides, Condé Nast Concierge, Travel Holiday, Ski, Arthur Frommer’s Budget Travel, and Bookforum. Her work has been anthologized in Crown’s The Collected Traveler book series and My Parents Were Awesome (Villard, 2011). She was the co-editor for One Ring Zero’s The Recipe Project (Black Balloon, 2011) and currently serves as an editor-at-large for the indie press Black Balloon Publishing.

Anna North graduated from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 2009, having received a Teaching-Writing Fellowship and a Michener/Copernicus Society Fellowship. Her first novel, America Pacifica, was published in 2011 by Reagan Arthur Books/Little, Brown, and she is currently a senior editor at BuzzFeed. North grew up in Los Angeles, and lives in Brooklyn.

Téa Obreht was born in 1985 in the former Yugoslavia, and spent her childhood in Cyprus and Egypt before eventually immigrating to the United States in 1997. Her writing has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Zoetrope: All-Story, The New York Times, and The Guardian, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading. Her first novel, The Tiger’s Wife, will be published by Random House on March 8 2011. She has been named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty and included in the National Book Foundation’s list of 5 Under 35. Téa Obreht lives in Ithaca, New York.

Shelly Oria was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Israel. Her fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, Quarterly West, cream city review, and fivechapters among other places, and won the 2008 Indiana Review Fiction Prize among other awards. Shelly curates the series Sweet! Actors Reading Writers in the East Village and teaches fiction at Gotham Writers’ Workshop and Pratt Institute as well as privately.

Helen Oyeyemi is the author of four novels, the most recent being White is For Witching, which won a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award, and Mr Fox, which won the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy award for fiction.

Dale Peck is the author of eleven books: four literary novels, two thrillers, two books for children, one young adult novel, one novel-cum-memoir, and a book of essays that everyone talked about but no one bought. He has published lots of different things in lots of different places, including newspapers that come out every day, magazines that come out every week, magazines that come out every month, literary quarterlies that come out four times a year (duh), some one-off things like anthologies and art catalogs and stuff, some websites that just sort of exist, and some venues that don’t exist anymore. He has received three awards for short fiction, one for a novel, and one for just being great (and because his publisher’s mother’s maiden name just happened to be Guggenheim). He has been arrested three times but never convicted, raised money for progressive political candidates (or the closest American approximation of progressive political candidates), and got gay married before Obama said it was okay. He also teaches, publishes, edits, podcasts, ghost-writes, screen-writes, rewrites, and is—officially—the 9th best Tetris player on the planet, so suck on that, Bakunyu from Canadia.

Helen Phillips is the author of And Yet They Were Happy (Leapfrog Press, 2011) and the forthcoming children’s adventure novel Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green (Delacorte Press, 2012). She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, The Iowa Review Nonfiction Award, the DIAGRAM Innovative Fiction Award, and the Meridian Editors’ Prize. Her work will be featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts in 2012. A graduate of the Brooklyn College MFA program, she teaches creative writing at Brooklyn College. Originally from Colorado, Helen lives in Brooklyn with her husband, artist Adam Thompson.

John Reed is the author of the novels, A Still Small Voice (Delacorte Press), The Whole (MTV / Simon & Schuster), the SPD bestseller, Snowball’s Chance (Roof Books, tenth anniversary edition forthcoming from Melville House), All The World’s A Grave: A New Play By William Shakespeare (Penguin / Plume), and Tales of Woe (MTV Press); MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University; published in (selected): Paper Magazine, the New York Press, Artforum, Bomb Magazine, Playboy, Vice Magazine, Out Magazine, Art in America, the PEN Poetry Series, the Los Angeles Times, the Believer, the Wall Street Journal.

J.E. Reich is the managing editor and fiction editor for the online magazine Art Faccia and recently completed her BFA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College. Writing credits include short stories in Volume 1 Brooklyn, Freshly Hatched, plain china: The Best of Undergraduate Writing 2010, Underground Voices, KGB Bar & Lit Journal, Blast Magazine, The Emerson Review, and others. Reich was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2010 and is a 2011 recipient of the Pitler Scholarship Award. Currently, Reich is living in Brooklyn as a candidate for the MA program in English Literature at Brooklyn College, working on her first novel, and interning for the Franklin Park Reading Series.

Tanya Rey was born and raised in Miami, Florida. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and The Chattahoochee Review. She holds an MFA degree in fiction from New York University. She has worked as managing editor for One Story magazine and has received fellowships from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, UCross Foundation, and Blue Mountain Center. She currently lives in Brooklyn, where she is hard at work on her first novel.

Nick Ripatrazone‘s debut book of prose poems, Oblations, was recently published by Gold Wake Press. His writing has appeared in Esquire, The Kenyon Review, West Branch, The Mississippi Review, and has been honored by ESPN: The Magazine. He teaches public-school English, as well as sport literature and contemporary fiction courses at Rutgers-Newark, where he graduated from the MFA program.

Roxana Robinson’s most recent novel,Cost, was named one of the five best fiction books of 2008 by The Washington Post, and won the Maine Publishers and Writers Award for Fiction. She is the author of the novels, Sweetwater, This is My Daughter and Summer Light, and three story collections, as well as the biography Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. Four of these were New York Times Notable Books. Robinson’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories and elsewhere. She was named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library, and has received fellowships from the NEA, the MacDowell Colony and the Guggenheim Foundation. She has been a Trustee of PEN American Center, and now serves on the Councils of the Authors Guild and the Maine Coast Heritage Trust. She lives in New York City.

Karen Russell is the acclaimed author of Swamplandia!, which was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize. It was also long-listed for an Orange Prize, included in The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2011 and won the New York Public Library’s 2012 Young Lions Fiction Award. She was named a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35″ honoree for her first book of short stories, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Her new collection of short stories, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, will be published in February 2013.

Eric Sasson received his M.A. in Creative Writing from New York University and has taught fiction writing at the Sackett Street Writers Workshop. His story collection, “Margins of Tolerance,” was the 2011 Tartt First Fiction Award runner-up and will be published by Livingston Press this May. His story “Floating” was a finalist for the Robert Olen Butler prize. Other recent publication credits include stories forthcoming in Connotation Press and Explosion Proof as well as recently published inBLOOM, Nashville Review, The Puritan, Liquid Imagination, Alligator Juniper, Trans, The Ledge, MARY magazine andTHE2NDHAND, among others. He’s honored to have been awarded a 2010 residency fellowship to the Anderson Center in Minnesota, where he completed an edit of his first novel, as well as a Hambidge residency for August 2012. He was born, bred and still resides in Brooklyn. www.ericsassonnow.com

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is the author of the acclaimed memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free, for which he received a 2010 Whiting Writers’ Award. It was selected as one of the ten best books of 2009 by Dwight Garner of The New York Times. His short stories and personal essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, The New York Times Magazine, among other publications. His short story collection will published next year by The Dial Press. Saïd lives in New York City with his wife Karen Mainenti.

Elissa Schappell is the author of Use Me, a collection of ten linked short stories, which was published in 2000 and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. She is the co-founder of the literary magazine Tin House and Editor-at-Large. She was previously a Senior Editor at The Paris Reivew. Schappell has co-edited two anthologies of essays The Friend Who Got Away, published in 2005 and Money Changes Everything, in 2007. She is a Contributing-editor at Vanity Fair, and author of the “Hot Type” book column. Her second book of fiction, Blueprints for Building Better Girls, came out last week with Simon & Schuster.

Alex Shakar’s latest novel, Luminarium, won the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction.  It was also named a Notable Book of the year by The Washington Post, an Editor’s Choice by The New York Times, and a best book of the year by Publishers Weekly, Booklist, the Austin Chronicle, and the Kansas City Star.  His novel The Savage Girl was a New York Times Notable Book.  His story collection City in Love won the FC2 National Fiction Competition.  A Brooklyn native, he now lives in Chicago.

Dani Shapiro is the bestselling author of the memoirs Devotion and Slow Motion, and five novels including Black & White and Family History. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Ploughshares, Elle, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, and has been broadcast on “This American Life.” She has taught in the writing programs at Columbia, NYU, The New School, Wesleyan, and Brooklyn College.  She is co-founder––along with One Story Magazine––of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. Her new book, Still Writing, will be out in 2013.

Jim Shepard is the author of six novels, including most recently Project X, and four story collections, including most recently Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which was nominated for the National Book Award and won the Story Prize, and You Think That’s Bad. His stories have been included in the Best American, PEN/O.Henry, and Pushcart prize anthologies. He teaches at Williams College.

Karen Shepard is a Chinese-American born and raised in New York City.  She is the author of three novels, An Empire of Women, The Bad Boy’s Wife, Don’t I Know You?, and the forthcoming The Celestials.  Her short fiction has been published in the Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, and Ploughshares, among others.  Her nonfiction has appeared in More, Self, USA Today, and the Boston Globe, among others.  She teaches writing and literature at Williams College in Williamstown, MA, where she lives with her husband, novelist Jim Shepard, and their three children.

Maggie Shipstead is the author of Seating Arrangements, which won the 2012 Dylan Thomas Prize and the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Her short fiction has appeared in Tin House, Ecotone, American Short Fiction, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. “La Moretta,” a story published in VQR, was a National Magazine Award finalist. Her second novel, Astonish Me, comes out in April 2014.

Joan Silber is the author of a new story collection, Fools, coming out in May of next year, and six other works of fiction, including The Size of the World (finalist for Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize), Ideas of Heaven (finalist for the National Book Award and the Story Prize) and Household Words (winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award).  A nonfiction book, The Art of Time in Fiction, was published in 2009. She lives on the lower east side and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Alina Simone is a critically acclaimed singer who was born in Kharkov, Ukraine, and now lives in Brooklyn. Her music has been covered by a wide range of media, including BBC’s The World, NPR, Spin, Billboard, The New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of You Must Go and Win, a collection of essays. Note to Self is her first novel.

Ali Simpson received her MFA in creative writing and literature this summer from Stony Brook Southampton. Her work has been published or is scheduled to be published in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, The Southampton Review, CONSEQUENCE, The First Line and Carrier Pigeon vols. X-XI. She has recently finish a collection of short stories called When Meat is Given a Second Chance. She works as a publishing assistant, teaches college writing and interns at a literary agency.

Eliza Snelling was also a finalist in L Magazine’s Literary Upstart Contest. Her work has appeared in the online journals The Writing Disorder and Swamp Writing and is forthcoming in the Wolf Review. Eliza is a Master of Fine Arts student in the fiction program at Brooklyn College and lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Jessica Soffer earned her MFA at Hunter College. Her work has appeared inGranta, The New York Times, and Vogue, among other publications. She teaches fiction at Connecticut College and lives in New York City.

Christopher Sorrentino is the author of five books, including Trance, a National Book Award Finalist for fiction, and the recently published Death Wish.  His work has been widely anthologized, and has appeared in A Public Space, The Baffler, BOMB, BookForum, Conjunctions, Esquire, Fence, Granta, Harper’s, The Los Angeles Times, McSweeney’s, The New York Times, Open City, Playboy, Tin House, and many other publications. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and he was Writer-in-Residence at Fairleigh Dickinson University in 2011.  He has taught at Columbia University, the New School, Fairleigh Dickinson University, and at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, where he is a core faculty member.

Diana Spechler is the author of the novels Who By Fire (Harper Perennial, 2008) and Skinny (Harper Perennial, 2011). She has written for The New York Times, GQ, O Magazine, Esquire, New York Magazine, Self, Details, The Wall Street Journal, Nerve, Glimmer Train Stories, and elsewhere. She is also a Moth StorySLAM winner and has been featured on NPR. She received her MFA degree from the University of Montana and was a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University. She teaches writing in New York City and for Stanford University’s Online Writer’s Studio.

A recent graduate of Vassar College, Kelly Stout is an editorial assistant at The New Yorker, and previously worked at PEN America: A Journal for Writers & Readers. She is the author of two unpublished novellas, a sometimes-contributor to newyorker.com, and is currently working on a collection of short stories. Originally from California, she now lives in Brooklyn and wants a dog.

Emma Straub is from New York City. Her first novel, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, was published by Riverhead Books in September 2012. Her debut story collection Other People We Married, was published in February 2012 by Riverhead Books. Her fiction and non-fiction have been published by Tin House, The Paris Review Daily, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Vogue, and New York, and many other journals. She is a staff writer for Rookie. Emma lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband. A more illustrated version of this appears at M+E.

Darin Strauss is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and a winner of the American Library Association’s Alix Award and The National Book Critics Circle Award. The internationally-bestselling writer is the author of the novels Chang & Eng, The Real McCoy, and More Than It Hurts You, and the NBCC-winning memoir Half a Life. These have been New York Times Notable Books, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon, Chicago Tribune, and NPR Best Books of the Year, among others. Darin has been translated into fourteen languages and published in nineteen countries, and he is a Clinical Associate Professor at NYU’s creative writing program.

Ben Stroud’s story collection Byzantium will be published by Graywolf in July.  The collection won the 2012 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Fiction Prize and was selected as a Publisher’s Weekly Best Summer Book for 2013.  Ben’s stories have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, One Story, Electric Literature, Boston Review, and The American Scholar, among other places, and have been anthologized in New Stories from the South and Best American Mystery Stories.  Originally from Texas, he holds a BA in English and History from the University of Texas at Austin and an MFA in Fiction and PhD in Twentieth-Century American Literature from the University of Michigan.  He has received residencies from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and has taught literature and creative writing at universities in the US and Germany.  Currently, Ben is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Toledo.

Called “disturbing, edgy and provocative” by Book Magazine, Terese Svoboda’s work is often the surreal poetry of a nightmare yet is written with such wit, verve and passion that she can address the direst subject. A “fabulous fabulist” according to Publisher’s Weekly, Vogue lauded her first novel, Cannibal, as a female “Heart of Darkness.” “Astounding!” wrote the New York Post about her memoir Black Glasses Like Clark Kent. Her fifth novel, Pirate Talk or Mermalade (2010), is “a strange and nastily beautiful book,”–The Millions. “She will, of course, compared to Willa Cather — and deservedly so,” wrote Kurt Andersen about her forthcoming Bohemian Girl. Svoboda has taught at Columbia’s School of the Arts, Bennington, New School, Sarah Lawrence, Williams and elsewhere.

Justin Taylor is the author of the novel The Gospel of Anarchy and the story collection Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever. His essays and criticism have appeared in Bookforum, The Believer, Oxford American, and elsewhere online and in print. He co-edits The Agriculture Reader, a small arts annual that will publish its 5th issue this fall. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Columbia and NYU.

Julian Tepper was born at Mount Sinai Hospital on April 1st, 1979. As the bass player for the indie rock band The Natural History, he co-wrote Spoon’s hit “Don’t You Evah” and helped produce the band’s two studio albums, Beatbeatheartbeat and the People That I Meet. Film director Stephen Daldry casted Tepper in a featured role in 2011′s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Julian is the co-founder of the The Oracle Club, a salon and workspace for artists and writers in New York. Balls is his first novel.

Susan Tepper is co-author of the new novel “What May Have Been: Letters of Jackson Pollock & Dori G”, the collection “Deer & Other Stories” and the poetry chapbook “Blue Edge.”  Tepper writes the MONDAY CHAT interview column on Fictionaut, and “Madame Tishka Advises on Love & Other Storms” at Thunderclap Press. She is the fiction editor of Wilderness House Literary Review, has published over 100 stories in journals nationwide, received 6 nominations for the pushcart prize and a nomination for NPR Selected Shorts for the title story of her collection Deer & Other Stories.

Lynne Tillman is the author of five novels, three collections of short stories, one collection of essays and two other nonfiction books. Her collection of short stories, This Is Not It, included 23 stories based on the work of 22 contemporary artists. Her novels include American Genius, A Comedy (2006), No Lease on Life (1998) which was a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Cast in Doubt (1992), Motion Sickness (1991), and Haunted Houses (1987). Her latest story collection is Someday This Will Be Funny (2011). She is the Fiction Editor at Fence Magazine, Professor and Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany, and a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Hannah Tinti grew up in Salem, Massachusetts. Her short story collection,Animal Crackers, has sold in sixteen countries and was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway award. Her best-selling novel, The Good Thief, is a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, recipient of the American Library Association’s Alex Award, winner of the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize,and winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club’s New Voices Award. Hannah is also co-founder and editor-in-chief of One Story magazine, and received the 2009 PEN/Nora Magid award for excellence in editing. Recently, she joined the Public Radio program, Selected Shorts, as their Literary Commentator.

Molly Tolsky is a fiction writer living in New York. Her work has appeared in The Collagist, The Fiddleback, MAKE: A Chicago Literary Magazine, and elsewhere.

Laura Van Den Berg was raised in Florida and earned her M.F.A. at Emerson College. Her first collection of stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books, 2009), was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection, longlisted for The Story Prize, and shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Award. Her second collection of stories, The Isle of Youth, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in November 2013. Laura lives in the Boston area and is at work on a novel.

Robert Vaughan’s plays have been produced in N.Y.C., L.A., S.F., and Milwaukee where he resides. He leads two writing roundtables for Redbird- Redoak Studio. His prose and poetry is published in over 150 literary journals such as Elimae, Metazen and BlazeVOX. He has short stories anthologized in Nouns of Assemblage from Housefire, and Stripped from P.S. Books. He is a fiction editor at JMWW magazine, and Thunderclap! Press. He co-hosts Flash Fiction Fridays for WUWM’s Lake Effect.

Kate Walbert was born in New York City and raised in Georgia, Texas, Japan and Pennsylvania, among other places. She is the author of A Short History of Women, chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2009 and a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, Our Kind, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2004, The Gardens of Kyoto, winner of the 2002 Connecticut Book Award in Fiction in 2002, and Where She Went, a collection of linked stories and New York Times notable book. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fiction fellowship, a Connecticut Commission on the Arts fiction fellowship, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. Her short fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize stories. From 1990 to 2005, she lectured in fiction writing at Yale University. She currently lives in New York City with her family.

Amy Waldman was a reporter for The New York Times for eight years. She spent three years as co-chief of the South Asia bureau after covering Harlem, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the aftermath of 9/11. She was also a national correspondent for the Atlantic, where her stories included this look at Islam in the courts. She has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and at the American Academy in Berlin. Her fiction has appeared in the Boston Review and the Atlantic, and was anthologized in The Best American Non-Required Reading 2010. She lives with her family in Brooklyn. The Submission is her first novel.

Douglas Watson’s first book, a collection of stories called The Era of Not Quite,won the inaugural BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize and has just been published by BOA. He also recently completed a short novel, which is being represented by Georges Borchardt Inc. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Fifty-two Stories, Tin House Flash Fridays, One Story, Sou’wester, The Journal, Ecotone, Salt Hill, and other publications. His story “Life on the Moon” was chosen by Dan Chaon and Wigleaf in 2012 as one of the year’s top fifty very short fictions. He will be featured as a literary debutante at One Story’s2013 Literary Debutante Ball. Watson was born in Scranton, Pa., grew up near Reading, Pa., and graduated from Swarthmore College. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Ohio State University and an MA in history from Brown University. He lives in New York City, where he works as a copy editor for Time magazine. And—of course—he plays in a band.

Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (Free Press, Spring 2013) and Kapitoil (Harper Perennial), for which he was the winner of a 2011 Whiting Writers’ Award. The recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, his work regularly appears in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at Marymount Manhattan College and lives in New York.

Edmund White is the author of twelve books of fiction, six books of nonfiction, three memoirs, a play and the biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust and Rimbaud. He is best known for his several autobiographical novels including A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty and The Farewell Symphony. He has been hugely influential as a literary and cultural critic, particularly on gay issues. He has received many awards and distinctions; among these, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He teaches at Princeton University and his latest book Jack Holmes & His Friend was released in January of this year.

David Whitehouse was born in 1981 in Nuneaton, England. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Guardian, theSunday Times, the Independent, Esquire UK, and the Observer Magazine. He is currently editor-at-large of Shortlist. His first short film,The Archivist, produced by Warp Films and the BBC, screened at film festivals worldwide. Whitehouse’s debut novel Bed was the winner of the inaugural Tell Hell with Prizes Award for best unpublished manuscript, and after its publication by Scribner and Canongate, won a Betty Trask Award and became a finalist for the Desmond Elliott Prize. Whitehouse is currently working on the screenplay of Bedfor Warp Films/Film4 and writing a new novel. He lives in London.

Adam Wilson’s first novel, Flatscreen, will be published by Harper Perennial in Februrary, 2012. He is the Editor of the international online newspaper The Faster Times. His writing appears or is forthcoming in many publications including The Paris Review,The Literary Review, Bookforum, and The New York Times. He is reading at Fiction Addiction in November and answers a few questions for me about publishing his first novel.

Meg Wolitzer‘s most recent novel is The Uncoupling, and her other books include The Ten-Year Nap, The Position and The Wife.  Her short fiction has appeared in “The Best American Short Stories” and “The Pushcart Prize Anthology.” Wolitzer has taught writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Columbia University, and the 92nd St. Y, among others. She lives in New York.

John Wray‘s first novel, The Right Hand of Sleep, was published in 2001 and received a Whiting Writers’ Award. In connection with his second novel, Canaan’s Tongue, he did a 600-mile tour by raft on the Mississippi River in 2005. In 2007 Wray was chosen by Granta magazine as one of the best American novelists under the age of 35. His third novel, Lowboy, was published in 2009. He is a recipient of the 2010/2011 Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin.

Jenny Zhang is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find (Octopus Books, 2012.) Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in Jezebel, Glimmertrain, The Iowa Review, The Guardian, Diagram, The Walrus, Octopus, and Weird Deer. She writes for teenage girls at Rookie magazine, and teaches high school students in the Bronx. There’s a tiny bit more at her website: www.jennybagel.com

Thad Ziolkowski is the author of Our Son the Arson, a collection of poems, and a memoir, On a Wave, which was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award in 2003. In 2008, he was awarded a fellowship from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Bookforum, Artforum, Travel & Leisure and Index. He directs the Writing Program at Pratt Institute. Wichita (Tonga Books, Europa Editions, 2012) is his first novel.

Tommy Zurhellen is the author of the novel “Nazareth, North Dakota” (Atticus Books, 2011) and his fiction has appeared widely in literary magazines such as Carolina Quarterly, Quarterly West, Passages North, The MacGuffin, Appalachee Review, South Dakota Review, River Oak Review, Crab Creek Review, Iconoclast, Red Mountain Review, Coal City Review, and the list goes on.

THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL, a band. Their name may be The Great American Novel, but their stock-in-trade is a cache of Great American pop songs. Said songs, which can be heard on their latest record, Kissing, whimsically blend New York garage with California sunshine pop, and are sure to appeal to fans of Guided By Voices, The Beatles and The Beach Boys, to name but a few. And in case you weren’t sure where their sensibilities lie, Kissing is also available on snazzy  red, white, and blue vinyl. Fronted by vocalist Layne Montgomery, bassist Pete Kilpin, guitarist JR Atkins, drummer Aidan Shepard and Devin Calderin on the keys, they’ve quickly become known to their fans as “the most fun you’ve had in a long time” and known to the internet as “a band of staggering depth”. These purveyors of fine pop music want you to get drunk and dance the night away.