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Jerry Apps, born and raised on a Wisconsin farm, is professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin - Madison and the author of more than twenty-five books, many of them on rural history and country life. Jerry and his wife Ruth continue to live part time on their farm near Wild Rose, which is the basis for Old Farm: A History. Jerry's nonfiction books include Every Farm Tells a Story and Ringlingville USA. He has written two young reader books and two novels. He received the 2007 Major Achievement Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers as well as the 2007 Notable Wisconsin Author Award from the Wisconsin Library Association.
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M.K. Asante, Jr. has written several award winning books including his latest It's Bigger Than Hip Hop, which was hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "An empowering book from one of America's best storytellers." He has also written, produced, and directed films including the soon to be released The Black Candle, a film narrated by renown poet and icon Maya Angelou. Born in Zimbabwe and raised in Philadelphia, MK Asante has lectured and read in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and more than 100 colleges and universities in the United States. Asante teaches Creative Writing and Screenwriting in the Department of English and Language Arts at Morgan State University.
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Livelihood Award and is the Citation of Lifetime Achievement winner of the 2008 Canadian Environment Awards. She is also the best selling author or co-author of 16 books, including Blue Gold, The Fight to Stop Corporate Theft of the World’s Water and the recently released Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and The Coming Battle for the Right to Water.
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Hundred! Demons!, The! Greatest! of! Marlys!, Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel, Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies!, and her first book for Drawn & Quarterly, 2008’s What It Is. D+Q plans to publish a multivolume hardcover collection of Ernie Pook’s Comeek starting in 2009, as well as a collection of the Nearsighted Monkey.
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Moustafa Bayoumi is an associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of How Does It Feel to be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America (The Penguin Press) and co-editor of The Edward Said Reader (Vintage). His essays have appeared in The Nation, The London Review of Books, The Village Voice, The Yale Journal of Criticism, Transition, Interventions, Arab Studies Quarterly, The Best Music Writing 2006, and other places. He also serves on the editorial committee of Middle East Report and is an occasional columnist for the Progressive Media Project, an initiative of The Progressive magazine, through which his op-eds appear in newspapers across the United States.
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Ann Beattie is an American short story writer and novelist. She has received an award for excellence from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a PEN/Bernard Malamud Award for excellence in the short story form. Her work has been featured in O. Henry award collections and Best American Short Stories of the Century. She has taught at Harvard and the University of Connecticut, and is currently the Edgar Allan Poe Chair of the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.
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Judy Blume spent her childhood in Elizabeth, New Jersey, making up stories inside her head. She has spent her adult years in many places doing the same thing, only now she writes her stories down on paper. Adults as well as children will recognize such Blume titles as: Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret; Blubber; Just as Long as We're Together; and the five book series about the irrepressible Fudge. She has also written three novels for adults: Summer Sisters, Smart Women, and Wifey, all of them New York Times bestsellers. In 1996, the American Library Association honored her with the Margaret A. Edwards Award for Lifetime Achievement, and in 2004 she received the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
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Jenny's memoir, She's Not There, published by Doubleday in 2003, was one of the first bestselling works by a transgendered American; until 2001 she published under the name James Boylan. She's Not Thereis popular both as a textbook in high schools and colleges as well as with readers's groups and won an award from the Lambda Literary Foundation in 2004. Boylan's books have been widely praised by many respected critics, writers and publications, including The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, New York Newsday and Entertainment Weekly. Since 1988, Jenny Boylan has been a professor of creative writing and American literature at Colby College and currently serves as Director of Creative Writing. Her 2008 memoir, I'm Looking Through You, is about growing up in a haunted house.
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Recently, the Boston Globe recommended Anthony Bukoski's short story collection North of the Port as one of five "short gems" worthy of summer reading. His other story collections are Time Between Trains, a 2003 Booklist Editor's Choice, Polonaise, Children of Strangers, and Twelve Below Zero. Bukoski's stories have been read by Karl Schmidt on Wisconsin Public Radio and by Liev Schreiber on National Public Radio. A Christopher Isherwood Foundation fellowship winner, Bukoski has received awards from the Robert E. Gard Wisconsin Idea Foundation, the Council for Wisconsin Writers, the Wisconsin Library Association, and the Polish Institute of Houston. He teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Superior in the port city where his émigré grandparents settled early last century.
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Lewis Buzbee is a former bookseller and sales rep, and the author of the acclaimed memoir The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, published by Graywolf Press in June 2006. A native Californian, he lives in San Francisco with his wife and daughter. Steinbeck's Ghost is his first book for children.
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Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s first novel, Madeleine Is Sleeping, was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Kafka Prize for fiction by an American woman. Her work has appeared in several journals and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Tin House, and The Best American Short Stories. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a NEA Fellowship, she teaches writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.
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Award-winning Cherokee author Trace A. DeMeyer recently completed her memoir, Split Feathers: The History of Indian Adoption Project. Trace is former editor of the Pequot Times and editor/co-founderof Ojibwe Akiing; and was news reporter and photographer at the national Native newspaper News From Indian Country in Wisconsin. Her academic writing was presented in Munich at the 26th American Indian Workshop and she as also authored "Honor Restored: The Story of Jim Thorpe" in the book The Olympics at the Millennium: Power, Politics and the Games 2000. Trace, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Superior, has received numerous news and feature writing awards.
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Baba Diakité was born in Bamako, Mali in West Africa. His work has received critical acclaim in international magazines such as Ceramics Monthly, Landscape Architecture, African Arts, American Ceramics and AFRIQUE/Etats Unis. Scholastic, Inc. published Wagué's first children's book The Hunterman and the Crocodile in 1997. It received a Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award in 1998. In 2007 Wagué and his daughter Penda Diakite received the Africana Book Award for I Lost My Tooth in Africa. Wagué is founder and executive director of Ko-Falen Cultural Center in Bamako, Mali, which enables artists from other countries to visit and work with artists of Mali.
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Paul R. Ehrlich is a co-founder with Peter H. Raven of the field of co-evolution, and is the author of The Population Bomb, and many other books, as well as hundreds of papers. Ehrlich is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Ehrlich has received several honorary degrees, the John Muir Award of the Sierra Club, the Gold Medal Award of the World Wildlife Fund International, a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, as well as many other distinguished awards.
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Reginald Gibbons is the author of eight volumes of poetry, most recently Creatures of a Day. He has also translated Spanish and Mexican poets, and ancient Greek tragedies. His most recent translations are of Sophocles, Selected Poems: Odes and Fragments. He has also published a novel, a volume of very short fiction, and other works, including the edited volumes Thomas McGrath: Life and the Poem and Goyen: Autobiographical Essays, Notebooks, Evocations, Interviews. From 1981 to 1997, Gibbons was the editor of TriQuarterly magazine. He is currently co-Director of the MA/MFA Program at Northwestern University and a professor of English, Classics, and Spanish and Portuguese.
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Catherine Gilbert Murdock's debut novel, Dairy Queen, won the Borders' Original Voices Award, the 2007 Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, and the 2007 Great Lakes Booksellers Children's Literature Award. Dairy Queen's sequel, The Off Season, soon followed and met with the same success. Her latest book, Princess Ben, was published in May 2008. She and her sister, the best-selling novelist Elizabeth Gilbert, grew up on a tiny farm in Connecticut. She now lives outside of Philadelphia with her husband and two children.
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Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 700 TV and radio stations in North America. Time Magazine named Democracy Now! its Pick of the Podcasts, along with NBC’s Meet the Press. Goodman is the co-author with her brother, journalist David Goodman, of three New York Times bestsellers. She writes a weekly column (also produced as an audio podcast) syndicated by King Features, for which she was recognized in 2007 with the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Reporting.
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Mary Gordon's work includes six novels, two short-story collections, essay collections, biography and memoir. She has received the Story Prize, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, and a 1997 O. Henry Award for best story. She teaches at Barnard College and lives in New York City. Her most recent book is Circling My Mother: A Memoir.
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Matthew Guenette's first book, Sudden Anthem (Dream Horse Press, 2008), won the 2007 American Poetry Journal Book Prize. His poems have appeared in a number of literary journals, and have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives and works in Madison, WI.
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Born in Sarajevo, Aleksandar Hemon visited Chicago in 1992, intending to stay for a matter of months. While he was there, Sarajevo came under siege, and he was unable to return home. Hemon wrote his first story in English in 1995. His work now appears regularly in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories. He is the author of The Question of Bruno and Nowhere Man, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hemon was awarded a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004. Riverhead will publish Hemon’s next book, Love and Obstacles, in 2009.
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Roberta J. Hill, an enrolled member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, is a poet, fiction writer and scholar. A professor of English and American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin ,she is the author of two collections of poetry, Star Quilt and Philadelphia Flowers. Her poetry has been selected for inclusion in the St. Paul Poetry Garden and the Midwest Express Convention Center in Milwaukee. Her fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in a number of anthologies and magazines. She has written a biography of her grandmother, Dr. Lillie Rosa Minoka-Hill, the second American Indian woman physician. She is currently at work on her first novel.
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C.J. Hribal is the author of the novels The Company Car, winner of the Anne Powers Book Award, and American Beauty and the short fiction collections Matty's Heart and
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Andrew Keen is the author of Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is killing our culture, which has been published into twelve languages and was short-listed for the 2008 Higham's Business Technology Book of the Year award. Andrew has appeared on the Colbert Report, BBC Newsnight and many others. He writes for the London Independent, as well as for the leading Dutch paper Volkskrant and the Belgium daily De Standaard and has written for many other publications. Andrew was educated at London University where he got a First Class Degree in Modern History, at the University of Sarajevo and at the University of California at Berkeley.
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Mia Kirshner works as an actor in film and television; most recently in Showtime's The L Word and Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia. I Live Here is her first book.
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Mike Konopacki graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1974 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science. He began labor cartooning for the Madison Press Connection. Since that time, he and Gary Huck have published five collections of labor cartoons, Bye! American, THEM, MAD in USA, Working Class Hero and the latest, Two Headed Space Alien Shrinks Labor Movement. Mike is co-author and illustrator of Howard Zinn's new graphic history A People's History of American Empire. Mike is currently a second year graduate student in Art at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
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Amitava Kumar is a writer and journalist born in Ara, India. He is the author of several works of literary non-fiction and has edited five anthologies. Husband of a Fanatic, Bombay-London-New York and Passport Photos have all won distinguished awards. Kumar has also written the script for two documentary films. He has been published in multiple magazines including The Nation, Harper's, among others. His novel Home Products was short-listed for one of India's major literary awards, the Crossword Prize. The forthcoming book, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, is a writer's report on the global war on terror. Kumar is Professor of English at Vassar College.
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Daniel Levitin runs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill University. Before becoming a research scientist, he was a record producer and professional musician. As a producer, he has a number of gold records to his credit, and has worked on albums by artists such as Stevie Wonder, Midnight Oil, and k.d. lang. He has played professionally with Mel Tormé, Blue Oyster Cult, and David Byrne. He has published extensively in scientific journals such as Science and Neuron and audio trade journals such as Grammy, Billboard, and Audio. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book This Is Your Brain on Music.
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David Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post and the author of four critically acclaimed and bestselling books: When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi; First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton; They Marched Into Sunlight - War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967; and Clemente - The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero. David is a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and won the Pulitzer for national reporting in 1993 for his newspaper coverage of then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton. He has won several other notable awards for achievements in journalism, including the George Polk Award, the Dirksen Prize for Congressional Reporting, the ASNE Laventhol Prize for Deadline Writing, and many others.
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Jacquelyn Mitchard is the author of the number one New York Times bestselling novel, The Deep End of the Ocean -- chosen as the first book for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club and named by USA Today in 2007 as one of the most influential books of the past 25 years, second only to the Harry Potter series. Mitchard has published three children’s books, two young children’s novels, Starring Prima! and Rosalie, My Rosalie as well as two children’s picture book, Baby Bat’s Lullaby and Ready, Set, School!. Rosalie, My Rosalie was a Banks Street Library Notable Book. Her first Young Adult novel Now You See Her, was published in February 2007 and she will have two more published in 2008, All We Know Of Heaven and The Midnight Twins.
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Steven Nadler is the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His books include Spinoza: A Life (winner of the 2000 Koret Jewish Book Award) and Rembrandt's Jews (named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2004).
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David Orr is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College in Ohio. He is the author of five books and co-editor of three others. Ecological Literacy is widely read and used in hundreds of colleges and universities. Earth in Mind is praised by people as diverse as biologist E. O. Wilson and writer, poet, and farmer, Wendell Berry. For over twenty years, Orr has been calling for higher education to awaken to sustainability and climate issues. In an influential article in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2000, Orr proposed the goal of carbon neutrality for colleges and universities and organized and funded an effort to define a carbon neutral plan for his own campus at Oberlin, and now hundreds of colleges and universities have made that pledge.
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Tom Perrotta is a novelist and screenwriter best known for his novels Election (1998) and Little Children (2004), both of which were made into critically acclaimed, Golden Globe-nominated films. Perrotta co-wrote the screenplay for the 2006 film version of Little Children with Todd Field, for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Perrotta's latest novel, The Abstinence Teacher, was chosen by the New York Times as a 2007 Notable Book of the Year.
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Michael Perry is a humorist and author of the memoirs Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time and Truck: A Love Story, and the essay collection Off Main Street: Barnstormers, Prophets, and Gatemouth's Gator. Perry has written for Esquire, the New York Times Magazine, Outside, Backpacker, Orion and Salon, and is a contributing editor to Men's Health. Perry resides in rural Wisconsin, where he has been active with EMS since receiving his EMT license in 1988, served 12 years as a firefighter with the New Auburn Fire Department, and still serves as an emergency medical first responder. He lives on a small farm with his wife and two daughters and is the proud owner of four pigs and, as of 7 a.m. this morning, 42 chickens.
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Tom Piazza is the author of nine books, including the novels City Of Refuge and My Cold War, and the book-length post-Katrina essay Why New Orleans Matters. He has been awarded the James Michener Award for Fiction and the Faulkner Society Award for the Novel, among many other honors. A well known writer on American music as well, he won a 2004 Grammy Award for his album notes to Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey.
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One of America's most honored science writers, Andrew Revkin has spent nearly a quarter century covering subjects ranging from Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami to the assault on the Amazon, from the troubled relationship of science and politics to climate change at the North Pole. He has been a pioneer in multimedia journalism, shooting still and video imagery for many stories, and he has been reporting on the environment for The New York Times since 1995.
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Marilynne Robinson's 1980 novel Housekeeping won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel, and her second novel, Gilead, won both the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Her third novel, a companion piece to Gilead entitled Home, is due to be published in September 2008. She teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and makes her home in Iowa City.
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Jeremy Scahill is the author of the bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army and is a frequent contributor to The Nation magazine and a correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now! He is currently a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill has won numerous awards for his reporting, including the prestigious George Polk Award. He has appeared on ABC World News, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, and others nationwide. Scahill also serves as an election correspondent for HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Christina Schwarz is the author of the critically acclaimed All Is Vanity and Drowning Ruth, a #1 bestseller in both hardcover and paperback, which was selected for Oprah’s Book Club and optioned by Wes Craven for Miramax
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Born in 1976, Ben Skinner was raised in Wisconsin and northern Nigeria, where his father had served as a British colonial administrator. In 2003, as a writer on assignment in Sudan for Newsweek International, Skinner met his first survivor of slavery. He had first flown in under enemy radar with an Evangelical group purporting to buy slaves en masse to secure their freedom. Afterwards, on his own, he hitched a ride on a U.N. Cessna to the frontlines of the north-south Sudanese civil war. Going undercover when necessary, Skinner infiltrated trafficking networks and slave quarries, urban child markets and illegal brothels. In the process, he became the first person in history to observe the sales of human beings on four continents.
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Patricia Smith is the author of five books of poetry, including Blood Dazzler, chronicling the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, and Teahouse of the Almighty, a 2005 National Poetry Series selection, winner of the 2007 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and the 2007 Paterson Poetry Prize. Teahouse was also voted the Best Poetry Book of 2006 by About.com. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly and many other journals. She is a Pushcart Prize winner, a Cave Canem faculty member and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history.
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Elizabeth Strout is the author of two novels: Abide with Me, a national bestseller and BookSense pick, and Amy and Isabelle, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in England. Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines, including The New Yorker. She lives in New York City and her newest book, Olive Kitteridge, is just out in paperback from Random House.
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Yi-Fu Tuan is the author of more than two dozen critically acclaimed books, including Space and Place, Topophilia, Escapism, Coming Home to China, and Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets. His previous books published by the University of Wisconsin Press are The Good Life, Morality and Imagination, and the autobiography Who Am I? Tuan is the J. K. Wright and Vilas Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has been honored with the Cullum Medal of the American Geographical Society, the Lauréat d'Honneur of the International Geographical Union, and the Charles Homer Haskins Lectureship of the American Council of Learned Societies.
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Ron Wallace is the author of twelve books of poetry, fiction, and criticism, including FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY (poems), Long for this World: New and Selected Poems, and Quick Bright Things. He is founder and co-director of the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and editor of the University of Wisconsin Press Brittingham and Pollak poetry series. He is married, with two grown daughters and three grandchildren, and divides his time between Madison and a forty-acre farm in Bear Valley, Wisconsin.
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Dave Zirin, Press Action's 2005 and 2006 Sportswriter of the Year, has been called "an icon in the world of progressive sports" and Robert Lipsyte says he is "the best young sportswriter in the United States." His column, Edge of Sports, appears on Sports Illustrated’s website, si.com. He is also the host of XM satellite’s weekly show, Edge of Sports Radio. Zirin’s next book, out this summer, is A People's History of Sports in the United States, part of Howard Zinn's People's History series for the New Press. As former Yankee and Ball Four author Jim Bouton said of this work, "Finally, the long-awaited prequel to all the sports books you've ever read. Put this first in the line of sports books on your shelf. It will help make sense of all the others."