Rae Armantrout

Honored poet RAE ARMANTROUT’s eleventh book, Money Shot, was released this January to critical acclaim. Armantrout won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for her thought-provoking book, Versed. She has been referred to as “the laureate of the everyday or uncanny,” and her work has been widely anthologized. She is a professor of writing and literature at UCSD.

Heidi Durrow

HEIDI DURROW’s debut novel, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is the winner of the Bellwether Prize for Fiction. Beautifully written in alternating voices, it is a very modern story that skillfully deals with a family tragedy that must be processed through the prism of biracial identity. The protagonist’s resilience makes it an ultimately hopeful story.

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Linda Gordon

Among her many accomplishments, historian LINDA GORDON received the 2010 Bancroft Prize in American history and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for her book, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits. The Los Angeles Times calls it a “superbly written biographical documentary.” Linda Gordon is the Florence Kelley professor of history at NYU. She has won many prestigious awards, including Guggenheim, National Endowment for Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Radcliffe Institute fellowships.

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Jennifer Haigh

JENNIFER HAIGH is the author of both The New York Times bestseller and award-winning Baker Towers, and Mrs. Kimble, which won the Pen/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Haigh creates rich character sketches, drawing the reader into the interwoven lives of families and making her books difficult to put down. She has published numerous short stories, and her latest novel is The Condition.

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Jayne Anne Phillips

JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS, author of Machine Dreams, Motherkind, Shelter and her award-winning Lark and Termite, is a consummate artist of contemporary American fiction. Her themes are powerful and probing; her prose stunningly beautiful. With wisdom and compassion, she delves into the dreams, thoughts, and memories of ordinary people as they face extraordinary experiences.

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Elaine Showalter

Critic, feminist, and leading scholar of women’s literature, ELAINE SHOWALTER is the author most recently of A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Ann Bradstreet to Annie Proulx. The work is the first comprehensive history of American women writers from the 17th to 21st centuries and follows by 30 years her groundbreaking work, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing. A professor emerita of Princeton University, she is a founding scholar of feminist literary criticism.

Tatjana Soli

A finalist for the 2010 Bellwether Prize, TATJANA SOLI’s debut novel, The Lotus Eaters, provides a unique and multilayered perspective of the Vietnam War through the eyes of a woman among men, a female photojournalist. A graduate of Stanford University and the Warren Wilson College, Ms. Soli lives in Orange County.

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