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Heidi Julavits • Eliza Minot • Amy Sohn • Anna Maxted • Thisbe Nissen • Elizabeth Benedict • Susan Minot • Mary-Beth Hughes • Jennifer Macaire • Kathy Lette • Martha Southgate • Colleen Curran • Rachel Resnick • Pam Houston • Darcey Steinke • Leslie Pietrzyk • Pagan Kennedy • Jennifer Weiner • Maggie Estep • Dana Johnson • Judy Budnitz • Shelley Jackson • Michele Serros • Suzanne Finnamore • Lucinda Rosenfeld • Erika Krouse

Elizabeth Benedict is the author of Almost; Safe Conduct; The Beginner’s Book of Dreams; Slow Dancing, a finalist for the National Book Award; and The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers. She writes for many publications, including Salmagundi, the New York Times, and Tin House, and has taught writing for many years. She lives in New York City and Somerville, MA.

Judy Budnitz is the author of the novel If I Told You Once, selected as an Orange Futures book by The Orange Prize for Fiction judges, and Flying Leap, a collection of dark, witty and weird short stories. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Story, Glimmer Train, Harper’s and 25 and Under. She is the winner of an O. Henry award and an NEA grant, and has taught creative writing at Columbia and Brown universities.

Colleen Curran lives in Richmond, Virginia where she is the associate editor of Richmond.com, a commercial webzine. Her fiction has appeared in JANE and Meridian. She is finishing up a collection of short stories and working on a novel.

Maggie Estep is the author of, Diary of an Emotional Idiot and Soft Maniacs. Her newest novel, Hex, is the first in a series of crime novels about horse racing, misanthropes, and Coney Island. Love Dance of the Mechanical Animals, a collection of short stories and essays, will be published in summer 2003. Maggie’s work has appeared in The Village Voice, NY Press, Black Book, and Nerve.com. She has performed her work on MTV, HBO, and on PBS. She lives in Brooklyn, NY and likes to hang out at racetracks cheering on long shots.

Suzanne Finnamore is the author of The Zygote Chronicles and Otherwise Engaged. She lives in Larkspur, California.

Pam Houston is the author of Cowboys Are My Weakness, Waltzing the Cat, and A Little More About Me. She lives in Creede, Colorado and Davis, California, and is currently at work on a novel, a stage play, and a collection of essays.

Mary-Beth Hughes is the author of a novel titled Wavemaker II. Her short stories have appeared in a number of literary journals, including The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, and the St. Ann’s Review.

Shelley Jackson was born in the Philippines, grew up in Berkeley, studied art at Stanford and writing at Brown, and now lives in Brooklyn. She is most widely recognized for Patchwork Girl, a hypertext reworking of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that has been compared to Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love and Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve. She has written and illustrated two children’s books: The Old Woman and the Wave and Sophia, The Alchemist’s Dog, and a story collection, The Melancholy of Anatomy.

Dana Johnson won the Flannery O’Connor Award in Short Fiction in 2000 for Break Any Woman Down and Other Stories. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she now teaches Creative Writing and English at Indiana University. At present she is working on a novel.

Heidi Julavits is the author of two novels: The Mineral Palace, and the forthcoming Pitcairn’s Mistake. Her short stories have appeared in Zoetrope, Esquire, Story, and The Best American Short Stories, 1999. The editor of literary magazine The Believer, she lives in Brooklyn, NY and Brooklin, ME.

Pagan Kennedy is the author of a novel, The Exes, and a biography about explorer and human-rights activist William Sheppard. She lives in Somerville, Mass.

Erika Krouse is the author of a collection of short stories, Come Up and See Me Sometime. She has published fiction in the Atlantic Monthly, Story, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and the New Yorker. She received her M.A. in English Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is currently living in Boulder and working on a novel.

After achieving succès de scandale as a teenager with Puberty Blues, Kathy Lette spent several years as a newspaper columnist in Sydney and New York (collected in the book Hit and Ms) and as a television sitcom writer for Columbia Pictures in Los Angeles. Her novels, Girls’ Night Out (1988), The Llama Parlour (1991), Foetal Attraction (1993), Mad Cows (1996), Altar Ego (1998) and Nip ‘n’ Tuck (2001) became international bestsellers. Mad Cows was recently made into a film starring Joanna Lumley. Kathy Lette’s plays include Grommits, Wet Dreams, Perfect Mismatch and I’m So Happy for You Really I Am. Her novels have been translated into fourteen foreign languages and are published in more than 100 countries. She lives in London with her husband and their two children.

Jennifer Macaire is an American freelance writer and illustrator living in France. A former model for Elite in Paris, she is married to a professional polo player and has three children. Jennifer has published short stories in magazines such as PKA’s Advocate, The Bear Deluxe, and the Vestal Review. One of her short stories was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has also written a series of fiction novels based on the life of Alexander the Great.

Anna Maxted lives in London with her husband, Phil Robinson, their son, Oscar and their cats, Disco and Natascha. Her novels, Getting Over It, Running in Heels, and Behaving Like Adults, were published in 2000, 2001, and 2003 respectively.

Eliza Minot was born in Beverly, Massachusetts in 1970. Her first novel, THE TINY ONE, was published by Knopf in 1999. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and son- succeeding relationships all around- and is at work on her second novel.

Susan Minot is the author of Rapture, Evening, Lust & Other Stories, Folly, and Monkeys and, most recently, Poems 4 A.M. She wrote the screenplay for the film “Stealing Beauty.” She lives in Maine with her husband and daughter.

Thisbe Nissen is the author of a story collection, Out of the Girls’ Room and Into the Night, a novel, The Good People of New York, and a thing called The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook (with co-author Erin Ergenbright), a work of fiction, recipes, and collages. A new novel, which will have the word “osprey” somewhere in its title, is due out from Knopf sometime in 2003. Thisbe lives in Iowa with her cats, Maisie and Fernanda.

Leslie Pietrzyk is the author of Pears on a Willow Tree (Avon Books), a novel about four generations of Polish-American women. Her short fiction has appeared in many journals, including TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, and The Sun, and her work has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

Rachel Resnick was born in Jerusalem, Israel. The daughter of a secular Talmudic scholar and a peripatetic Boston debutante, Resnick moved frequently as a child and into adulthood: Pulaski, Tennessee; New York City, New York; Cranford, New Jersey; Sylacauga, Alabama; New Haven, Connecticut; Rome, Italy; Athens, Greece. Her concern with place and setting, paramount in her debut novel Go West Young F*cked-up Chick, is an outgrowth of the constant moving she experienced as a child; so is a taste for travel. A graduate of Yale with an MFA from Vermont College, Resnick worked for years in film and television, in various jobs. She currently lives in Topanga Canyon with her severe macaw, Ajax. Her work has appeared in publications such as the anthology Absolute Disaster: Fiction From L.A. (Santa Monica Review and Dove Books), Tin House Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, Bakunin, The Minnesota Review, The Crescent Review, Chelsea, The Ohio Review, The Los Angeles Times, and has been honored with a 1998 Pushcart Prize Special Mention.

Lucinda Rosenfeld is the author of What She Saw… (Random House, 2000). Her next novel, a sequel, will be published at the end of 2003. She has published essays in the New York Times Magazine, the Sunday Telegraph (of London), and Creative Non-Fiction, among other publications. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Born in Oxnard, California, Michele Serros was still a student at Santa Monica College when her first book of poetry and short stories, Chicana Falsa and other stories of Death, Identity and Oxnard, was published. An award-winning poet and commentator for National Public Radio (Morning Edition, Weekend All Things Considered), Serros has released a spoken-word CD on Mercury Records and toured with Lollapalooza. Serros, who was called “one of the top young women to watch for in the new century” by Newsweek, made the Los Angeles Times bestseller list with her collection of fiction, How to be a Chicana Role Model. Currently living in New York City, Michele is working on a young adult novel tentatively titled Notes for a Medium Brown Girl.

New York Magazine columnist Amy Sohn is the author of the novel Run Catch Kiss (Simon & Schuster) and Sex and the City: Kiss and Tell (Pocket Books), the official companion guide to the hit television show. Her second novel, My Old Man, will be published by Simon & Schuster in 2004. She lives in Brooklyn, where she was born and bred.

Martha Southgate is the author of the novels The Fall of Rome and Another Way to Dance. Her short fiction has been published in Redbook magazine and in various anthologies, and she is the winner of a 2003 NYFA award for fiction. She has held fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and is at work on her next novel.

Darcey Steinke is the author of Up Through the Water, Suicide Blonde and Jesus Saves. She also edited a book of essays on the New Testament with Rick Moody called Joyful Noise. Her work has appeared in Spin, George, Artforum and the New York Times Magazine as well as other places. She teaches at the New School for Social Research in New York City and resides in Brooklyn with her daughter, Abbie. Her new novel is called Milk.

Jennifer Weiner is the author of the bestselling novels Good in Bed (now under development for HBO Films) and In Her Shoes. She lives in Philadelphia.