Nami Mun grew up in Seoul, South Korea and Bronx, New York. For her first book, Miles from Nowhere, she received a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers and the Asian American Literary Award. Miles From Nowhere was selected as Editors’ Choice and Top Ten First Novels by Booklist, as Best Fiction of 2009 So Far by Amazon, and as an Indie Next Pick. Chicago Magazine named her Best New Novelist of 2009.

Previously, Mun has worked as an Avon Lady, a street vendor, a photojournalist, a waitress, an activities coordinator for a nursing home, and a criminal defense investigator. After earning a GED, she went on to get a BA in English from UC Berkeley, an MFA from University of Michigan, and has garnered fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, Bread Loaf, and Tin House. In 2011 she became a US Delegate for a China/America Writers Exchange in Beijing and Chicago. Her stories have been published in Granta, Tin House, The Iowa Review, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Evergreen Review, Witness, and elsewhere. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in Chicago

Josip Novakovich moved from Croatia to the U.S. at the age of 20. He has published a novel, April Fool's Day (translated into ten languages) three story collections (Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust, Yolk and Salvation and Other Disasters) and three collections of narrative essays (Shopping for a Better Country has just come out) as well as two books of practical criticism, including Fiction Writers Workshop. His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize collection and O. Henry Prize Stories. He is a distinguished recipient of the Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Ingram Merrill Award and an American Book Award.

Novakovich has been a writing fellow of the New York Public Library and has taught at the University of Cincinnatti, Die Freie Universitaet in Berlin, Penn State and now, Concordia University in Montreal.

Benjamin Percy is the author of two novels, Red Moon (forthcoming from Grand Central/Hachette in 2013) and The Wilding, as well as two books of short stories, Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk. His fiction and nonfiction have been read on National Public Radio and published by Esquire, GQ, Time, Men's Journal, Outside, the Wall Street Journal, and the Paris Review. His honors include the Whiting Writers' Award, a fellowship from the NEA, a Pushcart Prize, the Plimpton Prize, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories and Best American Comics.

He is currently adapting the screenplay of The Wilding for filmmaker Guillermo Arriaga (Babel, 21 Grams). He is the writer-in-residence at St. Olaf College and teaches at the low-res MFA program at Pacific University.

Mark Winegardner's books include the novels The Veracruz Blues, Crooked River Burning, The Godfather Returns, and The Godfather’s Revenge, the story collection That’s True of Everybody and the textbook 3x33.  He is now working on a novel called Red-Blooded American Smut.  A Senior Writer for The Oxford American and a frequent contributor to ESPN The Magazine, Winegardner's work has also appeared in Details, Five Points, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, Playboy, Ploughshares, and many others.

Winegardner is the Burroway Chair of English & Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University. He served as director of the Creative Writing Program there for more than 10 years

Elizabeth Kadetsky's short stories have been chosen for a Puschart Prize, Best New American Voices and Best American Short Stories notable stories of 2009, and her personal essays have appeared in the New York Times, Santa Monica Review, Antioch Review and elsewhere. She has been a fellow at MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation, Djerassi Resident Artists Program and the St. James Centre for Creativity in Malta. A 25-year practitioner of Iyengar and Ashtanga yoga, she lived in India as a Fulbright scholar and wrote a memoir about her studies with the yogi BKS Iyengar, First There Is a Mountain, published in 2004 by Little, Brown. She is visiting assistant professor of creative writing in the MFA program at Penn State.

Jericho Brown worked as a speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before earning his Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. His first collection of poetry, Please, won the American Book Award. Brown is the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and a Whiting Writer's Award. He has also received two travel fellowships to the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland. His poems appear in magazines including, Oxford American, Ploughshares, and A Public Space, and in anthologies such as, The 100 Best African American Poems edited by Nikki Giovanni. He teaches Creative Writing as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Diego and lives bi-coastally between California and Washington, DC.

Monica Ferrell is the author of a collection of poems, Beasts for the Chase, which won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and was published by Sarabande Books. Her novel, The Answer Is Always Yes (The Dial Press/Random House), was named a Borders Original Voices Selection and one of Booklist’s Top Ten Debut Novels of 2008.  Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, A Public Space, Tin House, Slate and many other journals and anthologies.  A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Discovery/The Nation prizewinner, she directs the creative writing program at Purchase College and lives in Brooklyn.