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Alice Randall
Alice Randall is the author of The Wind Done Gone, Pushkin and the Queen of Spades and Rebel Yell. Born in Detroit, she grew up in Washington, D.C. As a Harvard undergraduate majoring in English, she studied with Julia Child, as well as Harry Levin, Alan Heimert, and Nathan Huggins.
After graduation Randall headed south to Music City where she founded Midsummer Music with the idea she would create a new way to fund novel writing and a community of powerful storytellers . On her way to The Wind Done Gone she became the first black woman in history to write a number one country song; wrote a video of the year; worked on multiple Johnny Cash videos’ and wrote and produced the pilot for a primetime drama about ex-wives of country stars, which aired on CBS. She has written with or published some of the greatest songwriters of the era, including Steve Earle, Matraca Berg, Bobby Braddock and Mark Sanders. Two novels later, the award-winning songwriter with over twenty recorded songs to her credit and frequent contributor to Elle magazine, is Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University. She teaches courses on Country Lyric in American Culture, Creative Writing, and Soul Food as text and in text.
Randall lives near the University with her husband, a ninth generation Nashvillian who practices green law. Her daughter is a student at Harvard. After twenty-one years hard at it, Randall has come to the conclusion motherhood is the most creative calling of all. Visit her on the web at www.alicerandall.com.
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Darnell Arnoult
Darnell Arnoult, a native of Martinsville, Virginia, has been writing fiction and poetry since the age of eighteen. She is the author of the Southern novel Sufficient Grace (Free Press / Simon & Schuster, 2008), as well as What Travels With Us: Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 2005), winner of the Appalachian Studies Association's Weatherford Award and the 2006 SIBA Poetry Book of the Year.
Darnell lived for twenty years in Chapel Hill and Durham, North Carolina, where she received a BA in American Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MA in English and Creative Writing from North Carolina State University. She also recently earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Memphis. Her fiction and poetry have been published in a variety of journals, and she has taught creative writing to adults for over fifteen years. In 2007, she was named Tennessee Writer of the year by the Tennessee Writers Alliance, and she was recently awarded the Mary Frances Hobson Medal for Arts and Letters. Darnell and her husband live on a small farm near Nashville, Tennessee. Visit her on the web at www.darnellarnoult.com.
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Blas Falconer
Blas Falconer is an assistant professor at Austin Peay State University, where he serves as the poetry editor of Zone 3 Magazine/Zone 3 Press. He is the author of The Perfect Hour (Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press, 2006) and A Question of Gravity and Light (University of Arizona Press, 2007).
Falconer won the New Delta Review Eyster Prize for Poetry in 2000, and he was a semifinalist for The Nation Poetry Prize in 1998, 2002 and 2003. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Another Chicago Magazine, Third Coast, Puerto del Sol, Lyric Review, Poet Lore, New Delta Review and the Baltimore Review.
Falconer received his MFA from the University of Maryland and his PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. He has also been a faculty member of Tennessee Young Writers' Workshop (which was established through funding from the National Endowment for Humanities), a group of talented published authors who are also writing teachers.
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Beth Ann Fennelly
Beth Ann Fennelly was born in 1971 and grew up in a suburb north of Chicago. In 1993 she received her B.A. magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame. The following year, Fennelly taught English in a coal mining village on the Czech/Polish border. She earned her M.F.A. at the University of Arkansas as a Lily Peter Fellow, then enjoyed a post-doc at the University of Wisconsin as the Diane Middlebrook Fellow. She is currently an Associate Professor of English at the University of Mississippi.
Fennelly's poetry has appeared in over forty anthologies, and she has published three full-length poetry books. Her first, Open House, won The 2001 Kenyon Review Prize, the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, and was a Book Sense Top Ten Poetry Pick. Her second book, Tender Hooks, and her third, Unmentionables, were published by W. W. Norton in 2004 and 2008. In addition to poetry, Fennelly writes nonfiction. Essays on the craft of writing have been published in The Writer’s Chronicle, Fourth Genre, Poets & Writers and The American Poetry Review. Literary essays have appeared in The Black Warrior Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, and regularly in The Oxford American, where she is a contributing editor. She also has published freelance in U.S. News and World Report, Garden and Gun, Country Living, and O at Home: an Oprah Magazine. In 2005, her nonfiction was awarded a Mississippi Arts Commission Grant. A book of essays, Great With Child: Letters to a Young Mother, was published by Norton in 2006, and has been translated into Greek.
Fennelly was awarded a $50,000 inaugural grant from United States Artists Foundation, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and a grant from the Illinois Arts Council. She's won a Pushcart Prize, the Wood Award for Distinguished Writing from The Carolina Quarterly, and The Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest.
Fennelly lives in Oxford, MS, with her husband, novelist Tom Franklin, their daughter, Anna Claire, and their son, Thomas. Together they spent the spring of 2009 in Brazil, as Fennelly received a Fulbright grant to study the work of Elizabeth Bishop.
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Matthew Gavin Frank
Matthew Gavin Frank's books include Sweat and Venom (forthcoming from Barrow Street Press), and Sagittarius Agitprop (Black Lawrence Press), and the poetry chapbooks Four Hours to Mpumalanga (Pudding House Publications), and Aardvark (winner of the West Town Press annual chapbook contest). His work has appeared in The New Republic, Creative Nonfiction, The Best Travel Writing 2008 and 2009, The Best Food Writing 2006, Epoch, Field, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, AGNI, Hotel Amerika, Gastronomica, Brevity, The Tampa Review and others.
Matthew Gavin Frank was born and raised in Chicago. Bitten by the food, wine, and travel bug, he left home at age seventeen, embracing the vagabond lifestyle that often lent itself to work in the restaurant industry. He ran a tiny breakfast joint in Juneau, Alaska, worked the Barolo wine harvest in Italy’s Piedmont, sauteed hog snapper hung-over in Key West, designed multiple degustation menus for Julia Roberts’s private parties in Taos, New Mexico, served as a sommelier for Chefs Rick Tramonto and Gale Gand in Chicago, and assisted Chef Charlie Trotter with his Green Kitchen cooking demonstration at the Slow Food Nation 2008 event in San Francisco. He returned to academia and received his MFA in Poetry and Creative Nonfiction from Arizona State University. He taught creative writing to undergraduates in Phoenix, Arizona, and poetry to soldiers and their families near Fort Drum in upstate New York on the Canadian border.
Frank is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, an Artist's Grant to the Vermont Studio Center, the Sonoran Prize for Poetry, and numerous grants from the Virginia G. Piper Center for the Creative Arts. Presently, he lives in Michigan with his wife, Louisa, and teaches creative writing at Grand Valley State University. His current favorite dessert recipe is Revisionist Caprese Salad: Basil Ice Cream, Mozzarella Syrup, Oven-Dried Sweet Tomato, and Tomato Rock Candy. Visit him on the web at www.matthewgfrank.com.
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William Gay
William Gay established himself as "the big new name to include in the storied annals of Southern Literature" (Esquire) with his debut novel, The Long Home, and his highly acclaimed follow-up, Provinces of Night. Like Faulkner's Mississippi and Cormac McCarthy's American West, Gay's Tennessee is redolent of broken souls. Mining that same fertile soil, his debut collection, I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, brings together thirteen stories charting the pathos of interior lives, the title story of which was recently made into a film starring Hal Holbrook. His third novel Twilight is Southern Gothic, with its elements of the grotesque and perverse, its psychological extremes and its fixations on violence and sex.
Gay says he came out of a really rural, poor sharecropper type environment. He wrote short stories and supported himself and his family by doing construction work, drywall work, painting, carpentry or whatever. He wrote about the life of the rural South, a culture he says has largely vanished. The Long Home won the 1999 James A. Michener Memorial Prize. His books have been hailed by the critics, Publishers Weekly, the New York Times Review of Books, The Washington Post Book World, Library Journal and USA Today.
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Fenton Johnson
Born ninth of nine children into an Appalachian whiskey-making family with a strong storytelling tradition, Fenton Johnson is the author of two novels, Crossing the River and Scissors, Paper, Rock, as well as Geography of the Heart: A Memoir and Keeping Faith: A Skeptic's Journey among Christian and Buddhist Monks, a meditation on what it means for a skeptic to have and keep faith.
He has contributed to Harper's Magazine, the New York Times Magazine and many literary quarterlies, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and two Lambda Literary Awards.
Johnson has taught in the graduate creative writing programs at San Francisco State University, Columbia University, New York University, and Sarah Lawrence College. He is currently on the faculty of the creative writing program at the University of Arizona. For additional information visit www.fentonjohnson.com.
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David James Poissant
David James Poissant's stories have appeared in Playboy, The Chicago Tribune, The Southern Review, West Branch, Willow Springs, The Chattahoochee Review, Redivider, Southern Indiana Review, and in the anthologies New Stories from the South 2008 and Best New American Voices 2008 and 2010. He has won the Playboy College Fiction Contest, the AWP Quickie Contest, the George Garrett Fiction Award, 2nd Prize in the Atlantic Monthly Student Writing Contest, and he was runner-up for the 2006 Nelson Algren Award. His stories have been nominated for the AWP Intro Journals Award and the Pushcart Prize.
David holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Cincinnati. He lives in Florence, Kentucky with his wife and two daughters.
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Chuck Sambuchino
Chuck Sambuchino is an editor for Writer's Digest Books (an imprint of F+W Media). He is the editor of two annual resource books, Guide to Literary Agents and Screenwriter's & Playwright's Market, and assists in editing Writer's Market (www.writersmarket.com). He recently helmed the third edition of Formatting & Submitting Your Manuscript (a WD trade book), and he has a forthcoming humor book with Ten Speed Press / Random House, due out in Fall 2010.
Chuck is a former staffer of several newspapers and magazines. During his tenure as a newspaper staffer, he won awards from both the Kentucky Press Association and the Cincinnati Society of Professional Journalists.
In addition, Chuck is a writer and freelance editor. He is a produced playwright, with both original and commissioned works produced. He is a magazine freelancer, with articles appearing in Watercolor Artist, Pennsylvania Magazine, Cincinnati Magazine and New Mexico Magazine. During the past decade, more than 500 of his articles have appeared in newspapers, magazines and books. Visit Chuck's blog at www.guidetoliteraryagents.com/blog.
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Robert Love Taylor
Robert Love Taylor grew up in Oklahoma City and now lives in Independence, Virginia. He received his BA from the University of Oklahoma and his PhD from Ohio University. For over three decades he taught creative writing and Appalachian literature at Bucknell University, where he also served as chairman of the English department.
His fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, Hudson Review, Southwest Review, Iowa Review, Shenandoah, Cimarron Review, and many other distinguished literary journals, as well as in Best American Short Stories, the O.Henry Awards, Pushcart Prize, New Stories from the South, and other anthologies.
The author of five books, Taylor received the Oklahoma Book Award for his novel The Lost Sister. His most recent novel is Blind Singer Joe's Blues, published in 2006 by Southern Methodist University Press.
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