John Aboud • Steve Almond • Touré • Matthew Sharpe • Adam Langer • Jeff Johnson • Jonathan Lethem • Michael Schur • Ben Greenman • Nick Fowler • Joshua Braff • Anthony Schneider • Richard Rushfield • Panio Gianopoulos • Lee Klein • Jack Murnighan • Darin Strauss • Dan Guterman • Sebastian Matthews • Jonathan Ames • Gary Shteyngart • Ben Schrank • Neal Pollack • Lewis Robinson • Marc Spitz • Justin Haythe • Dan Kennedy

John Aboud is a writer for film and television living in Los Angeles. In 2000 he co-founded the comedy collective Modern Humorist with writing partner Michael Colton. He and Colton appear regularly on VH1’s Best Week Ever.

Steve Almond is the author of My Life in Heavy Metal (Grove 2002), Candyfreak (Algonquin 2004) and The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories. For more on his various perversions, check out www.bbchow.com.

Jonathan Ames is the author of I Pass Like Night, The Extra Man, What's Not to Love?, My Less Than Secret Life, and Wake Up, Sir! He is the editor of Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs, and a new book of his essays will be published in 2006.

Joshua Braff was born and raised in New Jersey. He studied education at New York University and graduated in 1991. In 1997 he received an MFA in creative writing/fiction from Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, CA. The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green is his first novel and was published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. He has also published short fiction in national literary journals.  He lives in Oakland with his wife and two children.

Nick Fowler was born in Nuremberg, Germany, and raised in Ithaca, New York; La Jolla, California; and Tallahassee, Florida. After graduating from Cornell University, he was the lead singer of the rock band Tonto Tonto. He also composed music for and acted in a first-season episode of the HBO series The Sopranos. His work has appeared in GQ, Epiphany, Pulse, and The Antioch Review. His first novel, A Thing (or Two) About Curtis and Camilla, was published by Pantheon in June of 2002 and was nominated for the 2002 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. Nick teaches writing at The New School and NYU. He lives in New York with his dog, Monkey.

Panio Gianopoulos' fiction and nonfiction have appeared in various magazines and newspapers, including Tin House, Nerve, The Hartford Courant, The Journal News, Northwest Review, and The Brooklyn Rail. His essays were included in the anthologies The Bastard on the Couch and Cooking and Stealing: The Tin House Non-Fiction Reader. He is the recipient of a 2003 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in non-fiction literature.  

Ben Greenman is an editor at the New Yorker. His short fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Zoetrope, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He is the author of Superbad, Superworse, and the forthcoming Candidate. He lives in Brooklyn.

Dan Guterman was born and raised in Montreal, Canada where he briefly attended Concordia University. He works as a contributing writer for the award-winning satirical newspaper The Onion, and he has performed at the Just for Laughs Comedy Festival.

Justin Haythe’s first novel, The Honeymoon (published by Grove Atlantic and Picador UK) was Long Listed for the 2004 Man Booker Prize. His short fiction has appeared in Harper’s magazine in the United States and Zembla magazine in London. He is also an accomplished screenwriter (most recently credited for writing the 2004 feature film The Clearing, starring Robert Redford, Helen Mirren, and Willem Defoe) and was listed among Variety’s 2003 screenwriters to watch. He lives in New York City.

Jeff Johnson’s writing has appeared in Jane, Vice The Minus Times, City Pages, Flaunt, Fence, The Philadelphia Independent, The New York Post, and The New York Times. He lives in New York with his family and complains hourly at www.fittedsweats.blogspot.com.

Dan Kennedy is the author of Loser Goes First: My Thirty Something Years of Dumb Luck and Minor Humiliation. His work can be found in the book Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans: the Best of McSweeney’s Humor Writing. He lives in New York.

Lee Klein edits Eyeshot.net, wrote Incidents of Egotourism in the Temporary World, and currently attends the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Adam Langer is a journalist, playwright, and novelist. He is the former senior editor of Book magazine and the author of the novels Crossing California and The Washington Story.

Jonathan Lethem is the author of six novels, including Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude. His most recent book is a collection of essays, The Disappointment Artist. He has edited two anthologies and was the founding fiction editor of Fence Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn and Maine.

Sebastian Matthews is the author of the memoir, In My Father’s Footsteps (Norton, 2004). He has also co-edited, along with Stanley Plumly,Search Party: Collected Poems of William Matthews(Houghton Mifflin, 2004). His poems have appeared in, among other places, Atlantic Monthly, Blue Mesa Review, New England Review, Poetry Miscellany, Post Road, and Seneca Review. Matthews lives with his wife and son in Asheville, North Carolina, where he teaches at Warren Wilson College and edits Rivendell, a literary journal.

Jack Murnighan has a B.A. in philosophy and semiotics and a Ph.D. in medieval literature. He is the former editor-in-chief of nerve.com, where he wrote a weekly column on the history of sex and literature. A collection of these columns, The Naughty Bits, was published in June 2001 and another, Classic Nasty, in August 2003. He co-edited the anthology Full Frontal Fiction and has had short stories chosen for The Best American Erotica anthologies of 1999, 2000 and 2001. He currently teaches journalism at the University of the Arts and writes, now and then, for the glossies.

Neal Pollack is the author of several books, including the cult classic The Neal Pollack Anthology Of American Literature, and the rock-n-roll novel Never Mind The Pollacks. He writes the "Bad Sex" column for Nerve.com, a column about novelty music for emusic.com, semi-regular political satire for Vanity Fair, and for just about any other publication that asks. He plys his hack-for-hire trade out of his home in Austin, Texas, where he lives with his wife and son.

Lewis Robinson is the author of Officer Friendly and Other Stories, winner of the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award.  A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he received a Schaeffer Fellowship in 2002 and a Whiting Writers’ Award in 2003.  He lives in Portland, Maine and teaches in the Stonecoast MFA program.

Richard Rushfield is a journalist, author and seer housebound in Los Angeles. He is the co-founder of the satirical review The LA Innuendo and a contributing editor to Vanity Fair.

Anthony Schneider is the author of Tony Soprano on Management (Berkley, 2004). He has been published in the anthology The Literary Insomniac (Doubleday), and numerous magazines including Details, The Believer, Mid-American Review, Paris Transcontinental, The Reading Room, US News & World Report, The Globe & Mail, and BoldType. A Pushcart Prize finalist, he has held fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. He holds a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA from NYU's Graduate Creative Writing Program.

Ben Schrank is the author of the novels Miracle Man and Consent. He is at work on a new novel called Bag of Stones.

Michael Schur is a writer living in Los Angeles. He has written for Saturday Night Live and The Office.

Matthew Sharpe is the author of the novels The Sleeping Father and Nothing is Terrible and the short-story collection Stories from the Tube. He teaches at Wesleyan University and in the MFA program at Bard College.

Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972, and came to the United States seven years later. His novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, was named a New York Times Notable Book, a best book of the year by the Washington Post and Entertainment Weekly, and one of the best debuts of the year by The Guardian. His fiction and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. He lives in New York.

Marc Spitz is a Senior Writer at SPIN magazine.  His writing has also appeared in The New York Post, The Washington Post, GQ, Maxim and Nylon. He is the co-author of the oral history We Got the Neutron Bomb (with Brendan Mullen), and the author of the novel How Soon Is Never? (which will soon be a motion picture). His new novel, Too Much, Too Late will be published in 2006.

Darin Strauss is the author of Chang and Eng and The Real McCoy. His work has been translated into fourteen languages, and he teaches writing at Columbia and New York Universities. His third novel, as well as a book of short fiction and non-fiction, will be published by Dutton next year. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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