Ben Marcus is an American author and professor at Columbia University. He has written four books of fiction. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in publications including Harper's, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, The New York Times, GQ, Salon, McSweeney's, Time, and Conjunctions. He is also the fiction editor of The American Reader. His latest book, Notes From The Fog: Stories, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in August 2018.
Alice McDermott is an American writer and university professor. For her 1998 novel Charming Billy she won an American Book Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. She was shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction.
José Rivera is a playwright and the first Puerto Rican screenwriter to be nominated for an Academy Award for the movie, The Motorcycle Diaries.
Denis Hale Johnson was an American novelist, short-story writer, and poet. He is perhaps best known for his debut short story collection, Jesus' Son (1992). His most successful novel, Tree of Smoke (2007), won the National Book Award for Fiction. Johnson was twice shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Altogether, Johnson was the author of nine novels, one novella, two books of short stories, three collections of poetry, two collections of plays, and one book of reportage. His final work, a book of short stories titled The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, was published posthumously in 2018.
Josip Novakovich is a Croatian Canadian writer.
Janet Peery is an American short story writer and novelist.
Lydia Davis is an American short story writer, novelist, essayist, and translator from French and other languages, who often writes short short stories. Davis has produced several new translations of French literary classics, including Swann's Way by Marcel Proust and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.
Melanie Rae Thon is an American fiction writer known for work that moves beyond and between genres, erasing the boundaries between them as it explores diversity, permeability, and interdependence from a multitude of human and more-than-human perspectives.
Dagoberto Gilb, is an American writer who writes extensively about the American Southwest.
Pushcart Prize winner and Best American Short Stories author Mark Wisniewski's third novel, Watch Me Go, received early praise from Salman Rushdie, Ben Fountain, and Daniel Woodrell. Mark's first novel, Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman, was praised by the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and C. Michael Curtis of The Atlantic Monthly. Wisniewski's second novel, Show Up, Look Good, was praised by Ben Fountain, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Psychology Today's Creativity Blog, Jonathan Lethem, Christine Sneed, Molly Giles, Richard Burgin, Kelly Cherry, Diana Spechler, DeWitt Henry, and T.R. Hummer.
Salvatore Scibona is an American novelist. He has won awards for both his novels and short stories, and was selected in 2010 as one of The New Yorker's "20 under 40" Fiction Writers to Watch. His work has been published in ten languages. In 2021 he was awarded the $200,000 Mildred and Harold Strauss Living award from the American Academy of Arts and Letter for his novel The Volunteer. In its citation the Academy wrote, "Salvatore Scibona’s work is grand, tragic, epic. His novel The Volunteer, about war, masculinity, abandonment, and grimly executed grace, is an intricate masterpiece of plot, scene, and troubled character. In language both meticulous and extravagant, Scibona brings to the American novel a mythic fury, a fresh greatness."
Lysley A. Tenorio is a Filipino-American short story writer.
Kate Wheeler is an American novelist and meditation teacher. Since 2016, she has served as the coordinator of the Meditation Retreat Teacher Training Program at the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California, where she trains senior students to be empowered as teachers. She also is a practicing Buddhist teacher and instructor that offers retreats, talks, and person guidance to communities and individuals. Wheller received a Pushcart Prize as well as two O. Henry Awards.
Richard Burgin was an American fiction writer, editor, composer, critic, and academic. He published nineteen books, and from 1996 through 2013 was a professor of Communications and English at Saint Louis University. He was also the founder and publisher of the internationally distributed award-winning literary magazine Boulevard.
Mitch Berman is an American fiction writer known for his imaginative range, exploration of characters beyond the margins of society, lush prose style and dark humor.
James Robison is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter, and all around hack. The author of The Illustrator (1988) and Rumor and Other Stories (1985), his work has frequently appeared in The New Yorker and numerous other journals. He is a recipient of the Whiting Award for his short fiction and a Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has held teaching posts at numerous universities across the United States, including the University of Houston and Loyola University Maryland.
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is a satirical war novel written by Ben Fountain, which was published in early May 2012 by Ecco Press, a publishing imprint of HarperCollins. The novel chronicles the experience of a group of Iraq War veterans who are hailed as heroes and sent on a victory tour following their engagement in an intense firefight that happened to be caught on camera. Set during a single day, the story primarily focuses on Specialist Billy Lynn's perspective as he struggles to reconnect with his family and come to grips with the huge disconnect between the realities of the war at home and the war overseas as Bravo Squad is sent to participate in the Dallas Cowboys' Thanksgiving halftime show. The novel's primary themes include fraternity, the commercialization of war, and what it really means to support the war when the real costs are barely felt by the majority of US citizens at home.
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is a 2016 war drama film directed by Ang Lee and written by Jean-Christophe Castelli, based on the 2012 novel of the same name by Ben Fountain. The film stars Joe Alwyn, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart, Vin Diesel, Steve Martin, and Chris Tucker. Principal photography began in April 2015 in Georgia. The film is a co-production between the United States, the United Kingdom, and China.
Stephanie Powell Watts is an American author. She won a Whiting Award in 2013 and an Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence in 2012 for her book We are Taking Only what We Need, a collection of 11 stories that chronicles the lives of African-Americans in North Carolina. Her short fiction has been included in two volumes of the Best New Stories from the South anthology and honored with a Pushcart Prize.
Makenzie Leigh is an American actress, noted for playing the protagonist's romantic interest in Ang Lee's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2016).
