Beth Bachmann’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Antioch Review, and Agni Online, among other journals, and have been anthologized in Alice Redux and Best New Poets 2005. Her honors include the American Poet Prize, sponsored by The American Poetry Journal, and fellowships and scholarships from the Tennessee Arts Commission, Bread Loaf and the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. She holds graduate degrees from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars and Concordia University in Montreal and currently serves as book review editor for The Southern Review.

Kate Daniels, author of three volumes of poetry, including The Niobe Poems and her most recent work, Four Testimonies: Poems. Her first volume, The White Wave was awarded the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry.   She has her M.F.A. from Columbia University .  She has won the James Dickey Prize for Poetry from Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art and the Louisiana Literature Prize for Poetry from Southeastern Louisiana University . Her poems have been anthologized in a number of publications and have appeared in journals such as American Poetry Review, Critical Quarterly, and the Southern Review.   She has also edited a volume of poems by Muriel Rukeyser and co-edited the book Of Solitude and Silence: Writings on Robert Bly.

Tony Earley, author of three books: Here We Are in Paradise, Somehow Form a Family, and the novel Jim the Boy.  He received his M.F.A. from The University of Alabama.  His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire and The Oxford American, and has been anthologized multiple times in The Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South. He was named by Granta as one of the twenty best young American novelists, and The New Yorker named him one of twenty writers to watch in the twenty-first century. He won a National Magazine Award for his short story "The Prophet from Jupiter." He is the Samuel Milton Fleming Associate Professor of English.

Peter Guralnick, author of a celebrated trilogy on America’s roots music—Feel Like Goin’Home: Portraits in Blues and Rock ’n’ Roll, Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals ofAmerican Musicians, and Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm & Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom—and a definitive, two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love, each volume of which won a Ralph Gleason Music Book Award.  His most recent book is Dream Boogie:  the Triumph of Sam Cooke.

Rick Hilles, received his MFA from Columbia University. His first poetry collection, Brother Salvage, won the 2005 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was named the 2006 Poetry Book of the Year by ForeWord Magazine.  He was the 2002-03 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholar and has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, the Ruth and Jay C. Halls Fellow at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and was awarded the Larry Levis Editors' Prize from The Missouri Review. His work has appeared in Harper's, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, Salmagundi, Field and Witness.

Mark Jarman, author of nine volumes of poetry, including Iris (a book-length poem), Questions for Ecclesiastes, and To the Green Man. His most recent book, Epistles, is a collection of prose poems.  He received his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa . His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lenore Marshall/Nation Prize of the Academy of American Poets, and The Poets’ Prize.  His poems have appeared in journals such as the American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic Monthly. In addition, he is the author of two collections of essays: The Secret of Poetry and Body and Soul: Essays on Poetry.  He is Centennial Professor of English.

Lorraine López, author of Soy la Avon Lady and Other Stories, has a doctoral degree in English through the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia .  Her first book was selected by Sandra Cisneros to win the inaugural Miguel Marmól Prize for Fiction.  It also garnered the Independent Publishers Book Award for Multicultural Fiction and the Latino Book Award for Short Stories, awarded by the Latino Literary Hall of Fame.  Her novel The Gifted Gabaldón Sisters is forthcoming from Warner Books.  Call Me Henri, a young adult novel, has just been published by Curbstone Press.  She has co-edited a collection of critical articles on the work of Judith Ortiz Cofer. 

Alice Randall, author of The Wind Done Gone (2001) and Pushkin and the Queen of Spades (2004), is a New York Times best-selling novelist, an award-winning songwriter, a popular essayist, and a produced screenwriter.  Her fiction has been and is currently being taught at a wide range of universities, including: Harvard, Princeton, The University of Virginia, Wesleyan, and Vanderbilt. A graduate of Harvard University, she is studied in a variety of contexts: as a satirist, as a southern writer, as an African-American writer, and as a writer concerned with the nature of the feminine, both in text and in American life. Randall is also credited with being the only black woman in history to write a number-one country song “XXX’s and OOO’s, an American Girl.”

Nancy Reisman, author of House Fires and The First Desire, received her M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts , Amherst .   Her short story collection House Fires won the 1999 Iowa Short Fiction Award.  Her novel The First Desire won the Samuel Goldberg & Sons Foundation Prize for Jewish Fiction.  She has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown , and has won an O.Henry Award and the Raymond Carver Short Story Award.  Her stories have been included in numerous anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, O.Henry Award Stories, and Jewish in America.