Robert Coover is the author of fourteen books, including A Night at the Movies, Briar Rose, Pricksongs & Descants, and, most recently, Ghost Town. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the William Faulkner Award for best first novel for Origin of the Brunists. The Brandeis citation for Fiction, The Rea Award for the Short Story, three Obie awards, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. He was nominated for a National Book Award for his novel, The Public Burning. Mr. Coover has held teaching positions at Bard College, the University of Iowa, Princeton University, and Brown University, where since 1980 he has been Professor of English and teaches creative writing.
Susan Dodd is the author of three novels and three short story collections, including Old Wives Tales, No Earthly Notion, Mamaw, Hell-Bent Men and Their Cities, The Mourners’ Bench, and Careless Love. Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of magazines, including The New Yorker, Redbook, Iowa Review, and Yankee. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Iowa Award for Short Fiction, Friends of American Writers Award, a Distinguished Teaching Award from Harvard, and a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has taught creative writing at Vermont College, Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Harvard University and is currently at Bennington College.
John Edgar Wideman is the author of fourteen books that include novels, short story collections, and a memoir. He published his first novel, A Glance Away, in 1967. His other novels include. Hurry Home, The Lynchers, Hiding Place, Sent For You Yesterday, for which he won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1984, Philadelphia Fire. also a PEN/Faulkner Award winner,The Cattle Killing, and Two Cities. His short story collections are Damballah, Fever, The Stories of John Edgar Wideman, and All Stories Are True. He has been the recipient of the American Book Award for Fiction, a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, a MacArthur Prize, a grant from the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Foundation, and was the recipient of the 1998 Rea Award for the Short Story. He is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.