GERALD EARLY is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in the English Department at Washington University in St. Louis. He also holds an appointment in the African and Afro-American Studies Program, for which he served as director for eight years, from 1991 through 1998. He is currently the director of Center for the Humanities, formerly known as the International Writers Center started by philosopher/novelist William Gass in 1991. Professor Early has published several books including Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture and The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture, which won the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. He has also published One Nation Under a Groove: Motown and American Culture and Daughters: On Family and Fatherhood. He is currently working on a book about African Americans during the Korean War era as well as a novel about jazz for young people entitled “Up For It.” His latest book is called This is Where I Came In: Essays on Black America in the 1960s, a collection of three lectures published by the University of Nebraska Press.
	AMY HEMPEL is the author of four collections of short stories which all appear in The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, published in 2006 and named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by the New York Times. Collected Stories also won the Ambassador Book Award for Best Fiction of the Year, and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Hempel has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the United States Artists Foundation, and the Academy of Arts and Letters. She is director of the Graduate Fiction Program at Brooklyn College.
	JANE MCCAFFERTY is author of three books of fiction: Director of The World and Other Stories, which won the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature and the Great Lakes New Writers Award, a novel, One Heart, and a second volume of stories, Thank You For The Music, from HarperCollins. She has received an NEA grant for a section of her novel, and two Pushcart prizes in non-fiction and fiction. Her essays and stories have been published in a variety of literary journals, and six of her stories have been listed in Best American Short Stories. She has recently edited an anthology of writings by mentally ill people and those who care for them. She is an associate professor of English/Writing at Carnegie Mellon University.
	KATHERINE VAZ a Briggs-Copeland Fellow in Fiction at Harvard University and a 2006-7 Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, is the author of two novels, Saudade (St. Martin's Press), a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers selection, and Mariana in six languages and picked by the Library of Congress as one of the Top 30 International Books of 1998. Her collection Fado & Other Stories won the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and Our Lady of the Artichokes won the 2007 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Her fiction and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and her children's stories has been published in anthologies from Viking and Simon & Schuster.