T. Coraghessan Boyle has authored ten short story collections, and fifteen novels. His story collections include Descent of Man (1979); Greasy Lake & Other Stories (1985); If the River Was Whiskey (1989); T. C. Boyle Stories (1998); Without a Hero (1994); After the Plague (2001); The Human Fly and Other Stories (2005); Tooth and Claw (2005); Wild Child and Other Stories (2010); Stories II, The Collected Stories of T. C. Boyle, Volume II (2013). Boyle’s first novel Water Music (1981) won France’s Prix Passion publishers prize; his third novel World’s End (1987) received the PEN/Faulkner Award; The Road to Wellville (1993) was made into a major motion picture starring Anthony Hopkins. The Tortilla Curtain (1995) was awarded France’s Prix Médicis Étranger. He was National Book Award Finalist for Drop City (2003). His New York Times bestseller novel The Harder They Come (2015) was selected as one of the year’s ten best. Five times honored in The O. Henry Prize Stories, T. C. Boyle has received numerous other awards including the PEN/Malamud Award and the PEN Center West Literary Prize. Other honors include induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters; a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship; a Doctorate of Humane Letters honorary degree from State University, NY; the Howard D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Ross Macdonald Award; and the PEN/New England Henry David Thoreau Prize. T. C. Boyle has won the Robert Kirsch Award and The Rea Award for the Short Story. In addition to his published story collections, Boyle’s work has appeared five times in The Best American Short Stories and in numerous periodicals and anthologies including The Pushcart Prize, Granta, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review. Ecco/Harper Collins will release T. C. Boyle’s sixteenth novel, The Terranauts, in the fall of 2016. He lives with his wife in Santa Barbara.
Bill Henderson is Founder and Editor of Pushcart Press, publisher of the annual Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. His anthology, featuring fiction, poetry and essays, has earned national recognition and is celebrating its 40th Anniversary. The Pushcart Prize has been named one of the most influential projects in the history of American publishing. Pushcart Press was awarded the 1979 Carey Thomas Prize for Publisher of the Year by Publishers Weekly. Henderson received the New York Center for Independent Publishing’s Poor Richard Award in 2001; the 2005 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle and the 2006 Poets & Writers/Barnes & Noble’s “Writers for Writers” Citation. Henderson is the author of a novel The Kid That Could (1970); and the memoirs His Son (1980); Her Father (1995); Tower (2000); Simple Gifts (2006); and All My Dogs: A Life (2011). His most recent memoir Cathedral: An Illness and a Healing was published in 2014. He lives on the East End of Long Island and in Maine.
Karen Shepard is a Chinese-American born and raised in New York City. She is the author of four novels, An Empire of Women (2000), The Bad Boy’s Wife (2004), Don’t I Know You? (2009), and The Celestials (2013), which was short-listed for the Massachusetts Book Award and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her short fiction has been published in The Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, One Story, and Ploughshares, among others. Her nonfiction has appeared in O Magazine, More, Self, USA Today, and The Boston Globe, among others. She has received the William Goyen-Doris Roberts Fellowship for Fiction from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, was a National Magazine Award Finalist, and was a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grant. She teaches writing and literature at Williams College in Williamstown, MA, where she lives with her husband, novelist Jim Shepard, and their three children.