DEBORAH EISENBERG
The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg comprises four volumes of her work: Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986); Under the 82nd Airborne (1992); All Around Atlantis (1997); and Twilight of the Superheroes (2006), which won her the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Eisenberg’s play Pastorale was produced at Second Stage in New York City in 1982. Eisenberg is the recipient of many awards including the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the Whiting Writer’s Award, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. She has been honored six times in The O. Henry Prize Stories. Eisenberg won the 2000 Rea Award for the Short Story. In 2007 she was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She joined the Columbia University School of the Arts in 2011 after teaching at the University of Virginia from 1994. Eisenberg lives in New York City with Wallace Shawn, and she plays the role of Judy in André Gregory’s production of Shawn’s The Designated Mourner, which premiered in New York in 2000, was revived in 2013, and will play at Redcat Theater in Los Angeles this May.
AMY HEMPEL
Amy Hempel is the author of four short story collections: Reasons to Live (1985); At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom: Stories (1990); Tumble Home: A Novella and Short Stories (1997) and The Dog of the Marriage (2005). Her Collected Stories (2006) won the Ambassador Award for Best Fiction of the Year, and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. It was named one of The NewYork Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year. Hempel’s fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Harper’s, Vanity Fair, GQ, The Quarterly, and The New York Times Magazine, among many others. Her work has been translated into more than two dozen languages. Her awards and honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a United States Artists Foundation Fellowship, the PEN/Malamud Award for Literary Excellence, and the Harold Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2008, she won The Rea Award for the Short Story. Newly elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Hempel has taught at Harvard, Princeton, NYU, Sarah Lawrence, and Bennington, and now teaches at the University of Florida.
JOY WILLIAMS
Joy Williams is the author of five short story collections and four novels. Her story collections are Taking Care (1982); Escapes (1990); Honored Guest (2004); The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories (2015) and her most recently published is Ninety-Nine Stories of God (2016). The State of Grace (1973), her first novel, was nominated for a National Book Award for Fiction. The Changeling (1978) was reissued after 30 years in 2008 with an introduction by the American novelist Rick Moody, and The Quick and the Dead (2000), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals (2001), one of her two nonfiction works, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Her stories and essays are frequently anthologized. Among her many awards and honors are the Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters.Williams won the 1999 Rea Award for the Short Story. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2008.Williams lives in Arizona,Wyoming and Maine.