Doug will be reading from his new novel, GIrls I Know.

Michael McGriff was born and raised in Coos Bay, Oregon. He has received a Lannan Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from The Poetry Foundation, and a Michener Fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Choke (Traprock Books, 2006) and Dismantling the Hills (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), which won the 2007 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. He is also the co-translator (with Mikaela Grassl) of Tomas Tranströmer’s The Sorrow Gondola (Green Integer, 2010) and editor of To Build My Shadow a Fire: The Poetry and Translations of David Wevill (Truman State University Press, 2010). His most recent book is Home Burial (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). He is the co-founder and co-editor of Tavern Books. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Slate, The Believer, and Poetry, among other publications.

Malena Mörling was born in Stockholm in 1965 and grew up in southern Sweden. She is the author of two books of poetry: Ocean Avenue, which won the New Issues Press Poetry Prize in 1998, and Astoria, published by Pittsburgh Press in 2006. She has translated poems by the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, a selection of which appeared in the collection For the Living and the Dead, published by Ecco Press. Her poems have also appeared in numerous publications and anthologies including The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, Washington Post Book World, Double Take/Points of Entry, and Five Points. She was awarded The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award in 1999 and in 2004 the Lotos Club Foundation Prize.  In 2007 she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and in 2010 a Lannan Fellowship. She is currently working on a third book of poems and on editing Swedish Writers On Writing, an anthology that is part of The Writer’s World Series, forthcoming from Trinity University Press. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at The University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and Core Faculty in The Low Residency MFA program at New England College.

Tom Bissell was born in Escanaba, Michigan, in 1974. After graduating from Michigan State University, he worked briefly as a Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan and then as a book editor in New York City. His first book, Chasing the Sea, a travel narrative, was published in 2003. God Lives in St. Petersburg, a story collection, was published in 2005 and won the Rome Prize. The Father of All Things, a hybrid work of history and memoir about his father and the Vietnam War, was published in 2007 and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Kiriyama Prize. Extra Lives, a work of criticism about video games, was published in 2010. His work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Harper's, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The New Yorker, The New Republic, McSweeney's, Granta, The New York Times Magazine, and Tin House, and been anthologized in the Best American series seven times. He has lived in Michigan, Uzbekistan, New York, Saigon, Rome, Las Vegas, Estonia, and is currently based in Los Angeles.

Ken Chen is the executive director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. His first poetry collection, Juvenalia, won the 2010 Yale Younger. Other work has been published or recognized in Best American Essays 2006, Best American Essays 2007, and The Boston Review of Books. A graduate of Yale Law School, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Ravi Shankar’s collections of poetry include Instrumentality, a finalist for the 2005 Connecticut Book Awards; the collaborative chapbook Wanton Textiles, with Reb Livingston; and Deepening Groove, winner of the National Poetry Review Prize. Shankar has received numerous honors and awards for his work, including a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. He is founding editor and executive of director of the online arts journal Drunken Boat, one of the oldest electronic arts journals on the web. With Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal he co-edited the anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (2008). Chairman of the Connecticut Young Writers Trust, Shankar is associate professor at Central Connecticut State College and a faculty member of the first international MFA program at City University of Hong Kong.

Dale Peck published his first novel, Martin and John, which the New York Times called “a brilliant debut,” in 1993. Two more novels followed: The Law of Enclosures, which was adapted into a feature film by John Greyson starring Sarah Polley and Diane Ladd, and Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye. Other books include a memoir-cum-novel, What We Lost, which was overshadowed by the attention bestowed on his book of literary criticism, Hatchet Jobs, and its most notorious review, that of Rick Moody’s The Black Veil. Peck has published two novels for children, Drift House and The Lost Cities, one young adult novel, Sprout, and a literary thriller, Body Surfing. Peck lives in New York City with his boyfriend, where he teaches in the Graduate Writing Program of the New School. Co-sponsored by the Lesbian-Gay-Queer Research Initiative.

Christopher Castellani is the author of three novels: All This Talk of Love, a New York Times’ Editors Choice, The Saint of Lost Things, and A Kiss from Maddalena, winner of the Massachusetts Book Award. He is the artistic director of Grub Street, teaches every other semester in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, is on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and for the fall 2013 term will be a visiting professor at Swarthmore College. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Elizabeth Kostova’s first novel, The Historian, a tale of three generations of historians on the track of the original Dracula, was the fastest-selling debut novel in American publishing history. It has sold more than three million copies worldwide in 40 languages, has won numerous awards, and is being made into a film by SONY/Columbia Pictures. Her second novel, The Swan Thieves, a story of artists, psychiatry, and the rise of Impressionist painting, was published in 2010 and has been translated into 28 languages. She has also published introductions to new editions of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Kostova’s short fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in such venues as Mississippi Review, Poets & Writers Magazine, The Best American Poetry, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She is currently at work on a third novel, to be published by Random House. Kostova holds a BA in British Studies from Yale University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. She teaches at conferences in Eastern Europe and the U.S., reads and lectures internationally, and is co-creator of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation (www.ekf.bg), which provides competitive opportunities for Bulgarian writers, as well as opportunities for native-English writers to travel to Bulgaria. She lives with her family in Asheville, North Carolina.