Born in Lima, Peru and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Daniel Alarcon graduated from Columbia and returned to Peru soon after on a Fulbright Scholarship. He has an MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop and recently moved to Oakland, California. His first published short story, "City of Clowns," appeared in The New Yorker "Debut Fiction" issue in 2003. His short story, "Lima, Peru July 28, 1979" appeared in the Virginia Quarterly "New Luminaries" issue this past summer and will be reprinted in Harper's in November. Both stories will be included in his forthcoming collection, War by Candlelight, which HarperCollins will publish in April 2005. Some of these stories are set in a Peru roiled by political and social strife; others are set in New York, where Mr. Alarcon taught in the New York City public schools.

When Kirsten Bakis published her first novel, Lives of the Monster Dogs, with Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1997, it was named a New York Times Notable Book for the year, nominated for the Orange Prize in the U.K. and won the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel. Born in Switzerland Ms. Bakis grew up in Westchester County. She graduated from New York University, attended the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and in 1995, she was included in an article in Harper's Bazaar, "30 Under 30." Ms. Bakis has taught at Hampshire College and currently lives in southern Vermont with her husband. She is at work on her second novel.

Catherine Barnett's first poetry collection, Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, won the 2003 Beatrice Hawley Award and was published this year by Alice James Books. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, graduated magna cum laude from Princeton, and earned her MFA from Warren Wilson College. This year she has won a Pushcart Prize, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and an Outstanding Service award for her teaching at New York University. As Poet-in-Residence at the Children's Museum of Manhattan, she teaches poetry and memoir writing to young mothers in New York City's shelter system. Ms. Barnett has worked as an artist-in-residence at the Teachers & Writers Collaborative and as a senior editor at Art & Antiques magazine. She lives in New York City with her young son.

The Afterlife of Objects, Dan Chiasson's first collection of poems, was published in 2002 by the University of Chicago Press. He has just finished his second book of poems, Natural History, as well as a book of criticism. Mr. Chiasson was born and raised in Vermont, and has a BA from Amherst College. In 1999, he was a Whiting Foundation Fellow in the Humanities while finishing his dissertation at Harvard. A winner of a Pushcart Prize, his poems have appeared in such magazines as The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, and The New Yorker. Mr. Chaisson is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Poetry Center at SUNY Stony Brook. He lives near Boston in Sherborn, MA with his wife and infant son.

Allison Glock was born in West Virginia and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. She graduated from Indiana University and received a degree in journalism from Syracuse. In 2003, Knopf published Beauty Before Comfort, her memoir about her vivacious grandmother's life in a small West Virginia factory town. She was a writer-at-large for GQ for several years and currently writes for a number of other magazines, including The New York Times Magazine, ESPN Magazine, Self, and Cooking Light. Her writing has appeared in Best American Sportswriting. Ms.Glock now lives in Knoxville, Tennessee with her husband and two young children. She is at work on her second book, also about the South.

Elana Greenfield is the author of several plays, including Nine Come, most recently presented at the Flamboyan Theater in New York City and slated for publication by the University of Minnesota Press in their anthology of new plays. Possessed by a Demon: Two Tales of the Devil," was produced for public radio and also presented at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater as part of the New Works project. Her collection of short fiction and drama, At the Damascus Gate: Short Hallucinations, was published last year by Green Integer Press. Ms. Greenfield was a long-time staff member, rising to Artistic Director, of New Dramatists and now teaches at the New School University and at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Born in New York City and raised in Israel, she received a BA from Sarah Lawrence in Theater and Philosophy and an MFA from Brown University.

A. Van Jordan is the author of M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A (W.W. Norton, 2004), a cycle of poems about the life of the first African-American teenager to advance to the finals of the National Spelling Bee in 1936. His first book was Rise (Tia Chucha Press, 2001), winner of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Mr. Jordan grew up in Akron, Ohio and is a graduate of Wittenburg University, Howard University, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review, Callaloo, and Seneca Review, among others, and in several anthologies. He has taught at the College of New Rochelle and is currently an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Victor LaValle is the author of the short story collection, Slapboxing with Jesus (Vintage, 1999), winner of the PEN Open Book Award, and the novel The Ecstatic (Crown, 2002), which was a finalist for the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award. Much of his writing takes place in Queens, New York where he was born and raised. In fact, Mr. LaValle has been given the keys to southeastern Queens. He is a graduate of Cornell University and the MFA program in Creative Writing at Columbia University and he has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Mr. LaValle currently holds the position of Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College in Oakland and is at work on a new novel. Next year he will return to his home in Brooklyn.

John Jeremiah Sullivan's memoir, Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son, was published by Farrar Straus & Giroux in 2004. Born in Louisville, Kentucky and educated at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, he has traveled widely and settled in Mississippi for a time to edit the Oxford American. His writing has appeared in that magazine as well as the Paris Review and Harper's, where he spent four years as a senior editor (winning a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing in 2003). He is now a writer-at-large for GQ and has completed a fellowship at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, where he did research toward a novel, The Key of Fields. Mr. Sullivan and his wife divide their time between Wilmington, North Carolina and New York City.

Tracey Scott Wilson's most notable plays are Order My Steps, produced in 2003 for the Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles, and The Story, produced in 2003 for the Joseph Papp Public Theater and published this month by Dramatists Play Service. She is also the author of Exhibit #9 and Leader of the People. Ms. Wilson is a recipient of a Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights, and an AT&T Onstage Award. New York Theatre Workshop gave her a VanLier Playwriting Fellowship in 1998 and an Artist-in-Residence Fellowship in 2002. She holds a BA from Rutgers and an MA from Temple University. She was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey where she still lives.