Dana Spiotta is the author of the novels Lightning Field (2001); Eat the Document (2006), which was a National Book Award finalist and the winner of the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and Stone Arabia (2011), which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.  She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2007 and received the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in 2008.  She teaches in the Syracuse University MFA program.

 Alan Michael Parker is Douglas C. Houchens Professor of English at Davidson College. He is the author of seven collections of poems, including "Long Division," winner of the 2012 North Carolina Book Award, and three novels, including "The Committee on Town Happiness" (forthcoming from Dzanc Books). He has been awarded three Pushcart Prizes, the Fineline Prize from the Mid-American Review, and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, among other honors; he has published over 200 essays, poems, and stories in journals including American Poetry Review, The Believer, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The New York Times Books Review, and Best American Poetry. He has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Corporation of Yaddo, and read from his work and lectured widely, including on the Menominee reservation, and at the Sorbonne. He directs the creative writing program at Davidson College, and is a Core Faculty member in the Queens University low-residency M.F.A. program.