Andrea Barrett is the author of two collections of short stories, Ship Fever and Servants of the Map. Ship Fever received the National Book Award in 1996, and Servants of the Map was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. Barrett is the author of six novels, including The Voyage of the Narwhal and most recently, The Air We Breathe. She was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2001, received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and was a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Barrett was honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2003. She juried The O.Henry Prize Stories 1998. Her short stories have appeared in such periodicals as Mademoiselle, One Story, and Ploughshares, and in many anthologies, including Best American Short Stories and The O.Henry Prize Stories. Barrett currently teaches at Williams College and resides in North Adams, Massachusetts.
Amy Hempel is the author of four short story collections: Reasons to Live, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Tumble Home and The Dog of the Marriage. The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, a compilation of her complete work, was included in Ten Best Books of the Year 2006 by The New York Times and also named best book by Newsweek, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle and Time Out New York. The Collected Stories also won The Ambassador Book Award from the English Speaking Union for best fiction of the year. Amy Hempel won The Rea Award for the Short Story in 2008 and the Pen/Malamud Award for Short Fiction in 2009. She was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and has been honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an inaugural fellowship from the United States Artists Foundation, the Mary Frances Hobson Medal and a Silver Medal from the Commonwealth Club of California. Hempel’s stories have appeared in Harper’s, GQ and Vanity Fair. In addition to being anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize, her work appears in The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Hempel is a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in English at Harvard University and also teaches fiction in the Graduate writing program at Bennington College. She lives in New York City.
Jayne Anne Phillips is the author of two collections of short stories Black Tickets and Fast Lanes. Black Tickets won the prestigious Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her first novel Machine Dreams became a New York Times bestseller and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other awards include two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Fiction and the St. Lawrence Award for Fiction. Phillips is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Ingram Merrill Fellowship and a Bunting Fellowship from the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. Other novels include Shelter, MotherKind and most recently Lark and Termite, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. Phillips’ stories have been widely anthologized in such publications as Harper’s, Granta and Doubletake, as well as The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, Best American Short Stories, The O.Henry Prize Stories; The Pushcart Prize, Vols. II, IV, VIII and The American Story. She is Professor of English and Director of the Rutgers Newark MFA Program at Rutgers University, Newark. Jayne Anne Phillips resides in Boston and New Jersey.