Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Rick Bass
T. Coraghessan Boyle
Ana Castillo
Michael Cunningham
Zakes Mda
Luis Alberto Urrea
Terry Tempest Williams
Simon Winchester
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. She is from Abba, in Anambra State, but grew up in the university town of Nsukka where she attended primary and secondary schools and briefly studied Medicine and Pharmacy. She then moved to the United States to attend college, graduating summa cum laude from Eastern Connecticut State with a major in Communication and a minor in Political Science. She holds a Masters degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins.
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Nature writer Rick Bass is the author of many acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction. His first short story collection, The Watch , won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award, and his 2002 collection, The Hermit's Story, was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. The Lives of Rocks was a finalist for the Story Prize and was chosen as a Best Book of the Year by the Rocky Mountain News. Bass' stories have also been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award and have appeared in The Best American Short Stories.
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T. Coraghessan Boyle received a PhD in nineteenth-century British literature from the University of Iowa before beginning his writing career. He is the author of nineteen books of fiction, including, most recently Tooth and Claw, and Talk Talk. His short stories regularly appear in magazines. He has been a member of the English department at the University of Southern California since 1978. He currently lives near Santa Barbara with his wife and three children.
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Ana Castillo is the author of poetry (I Ask the Impossible, My Father Was a Toltec), short stories (Loverboys), essays (Massacre of the Dreamers), plays (Psst, I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor), and novels which include Watercolor Women Opaque Men, Peel My Love Like an Onion, So Far From God, Sapogonia and The Mixquiahuala Letters, as well as her most recent, The Guardians. She was born in Chicago and now lives in New Mexico.
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Michael Cunningham was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1952 and grew up in La Canada, California. He received his B.A. in English literature from Stanford University and his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. His novel A Home at the End of the World was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1990 to wide acclaim. Flesh and Blood, another novel, followed in 1995. He received the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel, The Hours. He has written one non-fiction book, Land's End: A Walk Through Provincetown. He is also the author of Specimen Days. Michael Cunningham is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Michener Fellowship from the University of Iowa. He lives in New York City.
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Zakes Mda is a South African writer of plays, novels, poems, and articles for academic journals and newspapers. His creative work also includes painting works of art, theatre and film productions. He has won numerous awards for his work, including the 2005 Notable Books Award of the American Library Association and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the Africa Region and the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award. He divides his time between South Africa and the United States, working as a professor of creative writing at Ohio University, a beekeeper in the Eastern Cape, a dramaturge at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, and a director of the Southern African Multimedia AIDS Trust in Sophiatown, Johannesburg.
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Award-winning and critically acclaimed author Luis Alberto Urrea has written 11 books, including the national bestsellers The Hummingbird's Daughter and The Devil's Highway. A 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Devil's Highway, Urrea has also won the Kiriyama Prize for fiction, a Lannan Literary Award, an American Book Award, a Christopher Award, and a Western States Book Award. Urrea attended the University of California at San Diego, earning an undergraduate degree in writing, and did his graduate studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder. After serving as a relief worker in Tijuana and a film extra and columnist-editor-cartoonist for several publications, Urrea moved to Boston where he taught expository writing and fiction workshops at Harvard. Urrea lives with his family in Naperville, IL, where he is a professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
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A naturalist and fierce advocate for freedom of speech Terry Tempest Williams is the author of the environmental literature classic, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. Her other works include: An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field, Desert Quartet, and The Open Space of Democracy. Pantheon Books will publish her new book Mosaic: Finding Beauty in a Broken World in 2008.
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Simon Winchester studied geology at Oxford and has written for Condé Nast Traveler, Smithsonian, and National Geographic. He is the author of A Crack in the Edge of the World, Krakatoa, The Map That Changed the World, The Professor and the Madman, The Fracture Zone, Outposts, Korea, among many other titles. He lives in Massachusetts and in the Western Isles of Scotland.
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