Susan Orlean has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1992. She had been contributing both signed articles and “Talk of the Town” pieces since 1987.
      Orlean has written more than 50 “Talk of the Town” pieces, as well as “Profiles and Reporter at Large” articles, and is currently writing a series of American popular culture columns, called “Popular Chronicles.” The “Chronicles” thus far have included subjects such as an article on designer Bill Blass, Harlem high school basketball star Felipe Lopez, the friends and neighbors of Tonya Harding, and D.J. Red Alert, a hip-hop radio star in New York.
     Prior to joining the New Yorker, Orlean was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and also at Vogue, where she wrote on numerous figures in both the music and fashion industries. Previously, she had been a columnist, first for the Boston Phoenix, and then for the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine. She has also written for the New York Times Magazine, Spy, Esquire and Outside.
     Orlean has written several books, including The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Ordinary People (Random House, 2001), a collection of nonfiction, profiles and essays; Red Sox and Blue Fish (Faber & Faber, 1987), a compilation of columns she wrote for the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine; Saturday Night (Knopf, 1990), a journal of essays which chronicle the Saturday nights she spent in communities across the country; and The Orchid Thief (Random House, 1998), a narrative about orchid poachers in Florida. The Orchid Thief was made into the movie Adaptation, adapted for the screen by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze.
    Orlean received her B.A. with honors from the University of Michigan in 1976. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and her dog Cooper. Cooper Gillespie has just published his first book of recipes.

Adrienne Brodeur is a consulting editor at Harcourt Trade Publishers. Currently, she is finishing her first screenplay and beginning her second novel. She is the founding editor of Zoetrope: All-Story, a fiction magazine she started with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola. She was Zoetrope’s editor-in-chief 1995–2002, during which time Zoetrope won the prestigious National Magazine Award for Best Fiction. Additionally, she has served as a judge for the National Book Award, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions fiction award and others. Her first novel, Man Camp, was published by Random House in 2005.

Amy Hughes is an affiliate literary agent at McCormick & Williams. Previously, she was a publicist at Simon & Schuster, an editor at Penguin, and has done freelance editing and writing for several publishing houses and magazines.

Sydney Lea is widely known for being adept in several genres. His most recent collection of poems is Ghost Pain (Sarabande Books, 2005). His second nonfiction volume, A Little Wildness: Some Notes On Rambling, has just been published by Story Line Press.
   Lea founded New England Review in 1977 and edited it until 1989. Of his seven previous poetry collections, Pursuit of a Wound (University of Illinois Press, 2000), was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The preceding volume, To the Bone: New and Selected Poems (University of Illinois Press, 1996), was co-winner of the 1998 Poets’ Prize. Lea’s novel, A Place in Mind with (Scribner, 1989) is still available in paperback from Story Line Press. His collection of naturalist essays, Hunting the Whole Way Home (University of New England Press, 1994), was reissued in paperback by the Lyons Press in 2003. Lea has received fellowships from the Rockefeller, Fulbright and Guggenheim Foundations and has taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Wesleyan, Vermont and Middlebury Colleges, as well as at Franklin College in Switzerland and the National Hungarian University in Budapest. His stories, poems, essays and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic, the New Republic, the New York Times, Sports Illustrated and many other periodicals, as well as in more than forty anthologies. He lives in Newbury, Vermont, where he is active in statewide literacy and conservation efforts.

Sebastian Matthews is the author of a collection of poems, We Generous (Red Hen Press, 2007), and a memoir, In My Father’s Footsteps (Norton, 2004). He co-edited, with Stanley Plumly, Search Party: Collected Poems of William Matthews (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), a recent finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Matthews teaches part-time at Warren Wilson College and edits Rivendell, a place-based literary journal. His poetry and prose have appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Brilliant Corners, Georgia Review, New England Review, Poetry Daily, Poets & Writers, Seneca Review, Tin House and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. Matthews was recently a recipient of a 2006 North Carolina Artist Grant.

Jason Ockert is the author of Rabbit Punches (Low Fidelity Press, 2006), a collection of short stories. He is the winner of the 1999 Atlantic Monthly Fiction Contest and the 2002 Mary Roberts Rinehart Award. His work has appeared in McSweeney's, Alaska Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, Mid-American Review and the Oxford American and is forthcoming in the Indiana Review. One of his stories has recently been selected for the 2007 New Stories from the South anthology. Ockert is currently completing a novel and second story collection.

Dana Sachs is the author the novel If You Lived Here (William Morrow, 2007) and The House on Dream Street: Memoir of an American Woman in Vietnam (Algonquin, 2000), and co-author of Two Cakes Fit for a King: Folktales from Vietnam. Her essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in such publications as National Geographic, The International Herald Tribune, and Travel and Leisure Family. A resident of Wilmington and part-time instructor at UNC-Wilmington, Dana was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship in 2005, which enabled her to spend a year in Vietnam researching a nonfiction book on Operation Babylift, the evacuation of several thousand Vietnamese children from Saigon at the end of the American War.

Jacob Slichter is a writer and drummer from Champaign, Illinois, who graduated from Harvard with a degree in Afro-American studies and history. His Minneapolis-based band, Semisonic, was formed in 1992 with guitarist/singer/songwriter Dan Wilson and bassist John Munson. After signing with MCA Records in 1994, Semisonic released several albums, including Great Divide, Feeling Strangely Fine and All About Chemistry. Best known in the United States for their chart-topping single “Closing Time,” Semisonic’s platinum-selling success landed them in the media spotlight—on the radio, on television with Jay Leno, David Letterman and Conan O’Brien, and on airwaves and stages around the globe.
    Slichter's critically acclaimed memoir, So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star (Broadway Books, 2004), is a literate and detailed look behind the scenes at the workings of the music business as well as at the mind of a performer who chases after superstardom with failure ever at his heels. He has also written for the New York Times and is an occasional contributor to NPR’s Morning Edition.

Dao Strom is the author of Grass Roof, Tin Roof, a novel (Mariner Books, 2003) and The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint Press, 2006), a book of stories. She was born in Saigon and grew up in northern California. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, and has been the recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship, a James Michener fellowship and the Chicago Tribune/Nelson Algren Award. She currently lives in Austin, Texas.

John Sullivan is a writer-at-large for GQ and a recipient of a 2004 Whiting Writers’ Award. He recently completed a fellowship at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. His memoir, Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son (Picador, 2005) was named a Book of the Year by the Economist. His writing has appeared in the Paris Review, New York magazine, the New York Times and Harper’s, where he spent four years as a senior editor. Sullivan taught a semester-long creative nonfiction workshop at UNCW’s Department of Creative Writing in fall 2005.

Suzanne Wise is the author of the poetry collection The Kingdom of the Subjunctive. Her poetry has also appeared in the anthologies American Poetry: the Next Generation (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2000) and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande Books, 2006), and in the journals Tikkun, Pierogi Press, Boston Review, Volt, Fence, Denver Quarterly and elsewhere. She has taught creative writing at Pratt Institute and Poets House in New York City, and at Middlebury College in Vermont.