Kim Barnes is the author of two memoirs, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country (finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize) and Hungry for the World, as well as two novels, Finding Caruso and A Country Called Home. She is coeditor with Mary Clearman Blew of Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers, and with Claire Davis of Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes from the Midlife Underground by Twenty-Five Women Over Forty. Her essays, stories, and poems have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including MORE Magazine, Fourth Genre, the Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She teaches writing at the University of Idaho and lives with her husband, the poet Robert Wrigley, on Moscow Mountain.
Ann M. Bauer is the author of the novel, A Wild Ride Up the Cupboards, which was published by Scribner in 2005 and named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post. She is a regular contributor to Salon.com and a frequent writer for many other publications, including Hallmark magazine, Redbook, the Sun, and the New York Times. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband and daughter and is working on her second novel.
Sophie Beck lives in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in Film Quarterly, Post Road, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere. She is coeditor of The Normal School and mom to two girls under three. She once bowled frozen turkeys on ice before thousands of onlookers between periods of a Thanksgiving hockey game. She fell over but also won a turkey.
R. Glendon Brunk‘s many friends and students honor him in death as they valued him in life—a gifted writer, teacher, friend, and iconoclast. Before his untimely death last year, Brunk had lived and worked in Alaska for most of the past thirty years. He was a champion dogsled racer and the author of Yearning Wild. Among many interests, Brunk created The Last Great Wilderness, a multimedia slide show designed to save the Arctic National Wildlife refuge from petroleum development and toured the country with it for three years. He taught writing and environmental literature at Prescott College in Arizona.
Jill Christman’s memoir, Darkroom: A Family Exposure, won the AWP Award Series in Creative Nonfiction and was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2002. Recent essays appearing in River Teeth and Harpur Palate have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work has also been published in Brevity, Barrelhouse, Descant, Literary Mama, Mississippi Review, Wondertime, and other journals and magazines. She teaches creative nonfiction in Ashland University’s low-residency MFA program and at Ball State University where she is an associate professor of English.
Steven Church’s first book, The Guinness Book of Me: a Memoir of Record, won the 2006 Colorado Book Award and has recently been optioned for television by Fuse Entertainment. His essays and stories have been published in River Teeth, Fourth Genre, North American Review, Colorado Review, Post Road, The Pinch, Avery, Salt Hill, Ecotone, Quarterly West, Matter, Quarter After Eight, Powells.com, and others. His work has been nominated five times for a Pushcart Prize. He teaches creative nonfiction and literature in the MFA Program at Fresno State, where he is a founding editor of the new literary magazine, The Normal School.
Tracy Daugherty is the author of four novels, a book of personal essays, and three short story collections, the latest of which is Late in the Standoff (SMU Press). He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. His biography of Donald Barthelme, “Hiding Man,” is forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press. He is Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at Oregon State University.
David James Duncan is the author of the novels The River Why and The Brothers K, the story collection River Teeth, and the nonfiction collections My Story as Told by Water and God Laughs & Plays. He lives with his family in western Montana, where he is working on a novel called Eastern Western.
Tom Feeney is a metro reporter at the Star-Ledger in Newark, New Jersey.
Tom French will take the position of endowed chair at Indiana University’s School of Journalism in the fall of 2009. He previously worked as a reporter with the St. Petersburg Times. His book, Zoo Story is forthcoming from Hyperion. He also teaches in the low-residency programs at Goucher and Poynter.
Diana Hume George is the author or editor of ten books of creative nonfiction, poetry, and literary criticism. Her recent essay in Creative Nonfiction, “Watching My Mother Hallucinate,” also appeared in the book Silence Kills, and was nominated for a Pushcart. She’s taught at Penn State, Allegheny College, Davidson, and SUNY Buffalo, and in 2009 she’ll be a visiting writer at Ohio University. George is on the core faculty of the MFA program in nonfiction at Goucher College, and she often teaches at Chautauqua, where she also codirects the Writers’ Festival and is a contributing editor of the journal, Chautauqua.
Philip Gerard is the author of three novels and four books of nonfiction, as well as numerous essays, short stories, and documentary scripts. He chairs the Department of Creative Writing at University of North Carolina Wilmington and with his wife Jill coedits Chautauqua, the literary magazine of Chautauqua Institution in New York.
Stephen Gutierrez is the author of many short stories and essays appearing in fine magazines and of short plays that have been awarded prizes in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a past Pushcart Prize nominee. His short story collection, Elements, won the Nilon Award sponsored by publisher FC2. He has a new book of stories, Live from Fresno y Los, forthcoming with Bear Star Press. He directs the creative writing program at Cal State University, East Bay.
Jessie Harriman, a West Virginia native, holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. Her essays have appeared in Best American Spiritual Writing, the Oxford American, Ruminate, Geez Magazine, and Bellingham Review, as well as a few other journals. She held the 2007–8 Milton Fellowship at Image and now teaches at the Oregon Extension with her husband Mike.
Walt Harrington heads the Department of Journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he teaches literary journalism. He is a former staff writer for the Washington Post Magazine and the author or editor of six books, including Intimate Journalism: The Art and Craft of Reporting Everyday Life and The Everlasting Stream: A True Story of Rabbits, Guns, Friendship and Family. A documentary film based on the latter book aired nationally on PBS last year.
Steven Harvey is the author of three books of personal essays. A Geometry of Lilies was twice honored as a finalist in the Associated Writing Program’s nonfiction contest before being published by the University of South Carolina Press. Since then he has published two books from the University of Georgia Press: Lost in Translation and Bound for Shady Grove. He has edited an anthology of essays written by men on middle age called In a Dark Wood, also from Georgia. He received his PhD in American literature from the University of Virginia and is a professor of English at Young Harris College as well as a member of the faculty in the Ashland University MFA program in creative writing.
Michelle Herman is the author, most recently, of the novel Dog and the essay collection The Middle of Everything. “Idolatry” is part of a second collection of personal essays with the working title Dream Life. She has taught at Ohio State for what seems like a thousand years. (And yes, all these many television seasons later, she has continued to watch “American Idol,” with a mixture of pleasure, fascination, horror, and despair.)
Barbara Hurd is the author of Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains (2008); Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling Through the Dark, a Library Journal Best Natural History Book of the Year (2003); The Singer’s Temple (2003); Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001 (2001); and Objects in this Mirror (1994). Her essays have appeared in numerous journals including Best American Essays 1999 and 2001, the Yale Review, the Georgia Review, Orion, Audubon, and others. The recipient of a 2002 NEA Fellowship for Creative Nonfiction, winner of the Sierra Club’s National Nature Writing Award, and Pushcart Prizes in 2004 and 2007, she teaches creative writing at Frostburg State University in Frostburg, Maryland, and in the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine.
Diana Joseph is the author of the short story collection Happy or Otherwise (Carnegie Mellon University Press 2003) and the memoir I’m Sorry You Feel That Way: The Astonishing but True Story of a Daughter, Sister, Slut, Wife, Mother, and Friend to Man and Dog (Putnam 2009). She teaches in the MFA program at Minnesota State University-Mankato.
Ted Kooser’s essay, “Small Rooms in Time,” was included by Susan Orlean in Best American Essays 2005. Since the original appearance of the essay in River Teeth, Ted served two years as U.S. Poet Laureate and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Daniel W. Lehman is author of John Reed and the Writing of Revolution and Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge, coeditor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative, and series editor of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize series for the University of Nebraska Press. A former journalist, Lehman is working on a book about the artistic and ethical implications of character formation in nonfiction narratives. Lehman was a Fulbright Scholar at Stellenbosch University near Cape Town, South Africa, and has traveled widely and studied nonfiction in Southern Africa. He is Trustees’ Distinguished Professor of English at Ashland University.
Andrea Lorenz is a reporter at the Austin American-Statesman. She wrote “When You Weren’t There: How Reporters Recreate Scenes for Narrative” to complete her master’s degree at the Missouri School of Journalism.
Margaret Macinnis was, in August of 2008, a VCCA Fellow at Moulin à Nef in Auvillar, France. Her nonfiction has appeared in Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, River Teeth, and elsewhere. A 2007 William Raney Nonfiction Scholar at Bread Loaf, she is the nonfiction editor at Pebble Lake Review and an editorial assistant at Iowa Review.
Joe Mackall is the author of Plain Secrets: An Outsider Among the Amish (Beacon Press) and of the memoir, The Last Street Before Cleveland: An Accidental Pilgrimage. He is cofounder and coeditor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative and of the River Teeth Literary Book Prize Series. His work has appeared in many publications, including the Washington Post, as well as on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. He’s working on a new book of nonfiction that will be published by Beacon Press in spring 2010.
Teddy Macker’s recent work is forthcoming in Antioch Review, Margie, and Court Green. He lives on an old farm in Carpinteria, California.
Nancy Mairs, though born by accident of war in Long Beach, California, grew up north of Boston. A poet and an essayist, she was awarded the 1984 Western States Book Award in poetry for In All the Rooms of the Yellow House (Confluence Press, 1984) and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1991. Her first work of nonfiction, a collection of essays entitled Plaintext: Deciphering a Woman’s Life, was published by the University of Arizona Press in 1986. Since then she has written a memoir, Remembering the Bone House, a spiritual autobiography, Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith, and Renewal, and three more books of essays, Carnal Acts, Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, and Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled, all available from Beacon Press. The work on her latest book from Beacon, A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories, was funded by a fellowship from the Soros Foundation’s Project on Death in America.
Lee Martin is the author of the novels, The Bright Forever, a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; River of Heaven; and Quakertown. He has also published two memoirs, From Our House and Turning Bones; and a short story collection, The Least You Need To Know. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such places as Harper’s, Ms., Creative Nonfiction, the Georgia Review, Story, DoubleTake, the Kenyon Review, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, the Southern Review, and Glimmer Train. He is the winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council, as well as the 2006 Ohio State University Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching. Since 2001 he has taught in the MFA Program at The Ohio State University where he is now professor of English and director of creative writing.
Rebecca Mcclanahan has published nine books, most recently Deep Light: New and Selected Poems 1987–2007 and The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings, which won the 2005 Glasgow Award for nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, and numerous anthologies; her awards include the Wood prize from Poetry, a Pushcart Prize, and the Carter award for the essay. She and her husband have recently celebrated their tenth year in New York and all signs (as in “Signs and Wonders”) point to many more years in the city they have grown to love.
Amy Morgenstern holds a PhD in philosophy in the areas of ancient Greek philosophy, gender and queer theory, postmodern theory, and phenomenology. After nine years of working in academia, she left to pursue an MFA in multimedia conceptual art at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work, comprising video, audio, text, and photography, operates at the limit between speech and speechlessness. It takes its departure from the idea that language is the seat of our humanity or inhumanity. Her most recent project is a video performance during which she plants herself in the earth at Pt. Reyes National Park for three hours over dusk.
Chris Offutt is the author of Kentucky Straight, Out of the Woods, The Good Brother, The Same River Twice, and No Heroes. His stories and essays have been published in Esquire, GQ, the New York Times, Best American Short Stories, and four appearances in Best Stories of the South. In 1996 Granta magazine selected him as one of the twenty best writers in the United States. He is the recipient of a Lannan Award, the Whiting Writer’s award, a Guggenheim fellowship, an NEA grant, and a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for “prose that takes risks.” His short fiction has twice been read on NPR’s program Selected Short Stories and All Things Considered. He has also written screenplays, teleplays for HBO and TNT, and scripts for graphic novels. His work is excerpted in many textbooks, and his books are taught in colleges and high schools throughout the country. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Iowa, University of Montana, University of New Mexico, and Mercer University. Chris has many interests but no hobbies. He lives in Iowa and owns the Midwest’s largest collection of rocks with holes in them.
Sam Pickering has written twenty-one books and teaches English at the University of Connecticut. He has just returned from half a year in Australia where he spent his time roaming libraries and the outback and writing “A Tramp’s Wallet,” a manuscript describing his rambles.
Seth Sawyers’s work has appeared in Fourth Genre, Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter, Fugue, Jabberwock Review, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a memoir about growing up in the 1980s, deep in the western Maryland hills. “Fried Eggs” was his first publication, and he will always remember the call from River Teeth, a call he answered on a pay-as-you-go cell phone while working a one-week temp job, alphabetizing personnel files for a multinational corporation. He lives in Baltimore and teaches writing classes at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He has an MFA from Old Dominion University.
Floyd Skloot’s new memoir, The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer’s Life was published by the University of Nebraska Press in fall 2008. His newest collection of poems, The Snow’s Music appeared from LSU Press also in the fall 2008. His work will be included in the 2009 Pushcart Prize anthology, his third Pushcart appearance.
Brent Spencer is the author of a novel, The Lost Son, and a collection of short stories, Are We Not Men?, chosen by the editors of the Village Voice Literary Supplement as one of the twenty-five best books of the year. His short stories have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, American Literary Review, Epoch, the Missouri Review, GQ, and elsewhere. His story “The True History,” first published in Prairie Schooner (summer 2006), is included in the 2007 edition of Best American Mystery Stories, edited by Carl Hiaasen. He teaches fiction writing and screenwriting at Creighton University and is at work on a new novel.
Maureen Stanton’s essays have appeared in Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, the Sun, Crab Orchard Review and other journals and anthologies. Her nonfiction has received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, the Iowa Review award, the American Literary Review award, and been listed as “notable” in Best American Essays (1998, 2004, 2005). She teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Missouri in Columbia.
Deborah Peterson Swift, a former staff writer for Northeast magazine who bicycled from Hartford to San Diego in 1996 and wrote about it for the Hartford Courant, headed West again in 2005 and this time settled there. She is Deputy Features editor at the San Jose Mercury News and when she is not editing stories about food, wine, and house tours in Silicon Valley, she is contemplating writing a book about the differences between living in the East and the West. (Think hanging out in the sun at a glorious farmer’s market, waiting for the termite fumigator to finish spraying poison gas in your breathtakingly expensive condo). Deb is working on a screenplay about her mother’s decision to die and exploring California with her writer-husband, Mike Swift. They share their time between Northern California and Truro on Cape Cod.
Gay Talese was born in Ocean City, New Jersey, on February 7, 1932, to Italian immigrant parents. He attended the University of Alabama and after graduation was hired as a copyboy at the New York Times. After a brief stint in the Army, Talese returned to the New York Times in 1956 and worked there as a reporter until 1965. Since then he has written for numerous publications, including Esquire, the New Yorker, Newsweek, and Harper’s Magazine. Talese has written eleven books. His most recent book is A Writer’s Life, a memoir about the inner workings of a writer’s life and the interplay between experience and writing. Talese lives with his wife, Nan, in New York City. He is working on a book about marriage for Knopf.
Brad K. Younkin: Before his untimely death, Brad K. Younkin taught English in Pasadena, California. He earned his MFA at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. “The Speed of Memory” was his first published work.
