Andrea Barrett is the author of six novels and two collections of short fiction, Ship Fever, which received the National Book Award, and Servants of the Map, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A MacArthur Fellow, she’s also received Guggenheim and NEA fellowships. She currently teaches at Williams College in Massachusetts.
Journalist, critic, teacher and author, Thrity Umrigar illustrates her sharp sensitivity to class divisions and keen observations of human connections in her compelling novels, Bombay Time, If Today Be Sweet and The Space Between Us, and poignant memoir, First Darling of the Morning. Her complex, sympathetic characters offer us a rare glimpse into the stratified society of modern India.
Geraldine Brooks is the author of the novel March, which received the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her novel, People of the Book, is scheduled for release January 2008. She is also the author of Year of Wonders, Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondent. Brooks was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bosnia, Somalia and the Middle East.
Meg Wolitzer has published seven novels, which include The Position, which was long-listed for the UK’s Orange Prize, The Wife and Surrender, Dorothy. She has taught creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Skidmore College, Columbia University and the 92nd Street Y of New York City. Her new novel, The Ten-Year Nap, will be published in March.
Bo Caldwell’s debut novel, The Distant Land of My Father, details a journey back to the magical land of the narrator’s childhood, Shanghai prior to the Japanese invasion. Selected as a Los Angeles Times Best Book 2001, the fictional memoir explores the themes of betrayal and forgiveness and the enduring love between a parent and child.
Sigrid Nunez is the author of four novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God and For Rouenna. She has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Rome Prize in Literature and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. Her latest novel, The Last of Her Kind, examines the intense and difficult friendship between two college roommates.
Susan Tyler Hitchcock, author of the recently published Frankenstein: A Cultural History, is a prolific nonfiction writer and editor. She has written professionally for more than 30 years, contributing to newspapers, magazines and essay anthologies as well as writing her own books, including Mad Mary Lamb: Lunacy and Murder in Literary London and Gather Ye Wild Things: A Forager’s Year.
