Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. Norman Lock has written novels, short fiction, and poetry as well as stage plays, dramas for German radio, a film for The American Film Institute, and scenarios for video-art installations. His plays have been produced in the U.S., Germany, at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival, and in Turkey. His work has been translated into Dutch, German, Spanish, Turkish, and Japanese. He received the Aga Kahn Prize, given by The Paris Review, the Literary Fiction Prize, given by The Dactyl Foundation of the Arts & Humanities, fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. (source: http://www.normanlock.com/)

NYT bestselling writer Jeff VanderMeer has been called “the weird Thoreau” by the New Yorker for his engagement with ecological issues. His most recent novel, the national bestseller Borne, received wide-spread critical acclaim and his prior novels include the Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance). Annihilation won the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards, has been translated into 35 languages, and was made into a film from Paramount Pictures directed by Alex Garland. His nonfiction has appeared in New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, Slate, Salon, and the Washington Post. He has coedited several iconic anthologies with his wife, the Hugo Award winning editor. Other titles include Wonderbook, the world’s first fully illustrated creative writing guide. VanderMeer served as the 2016-2017 Trias Writer in Residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He has spoken at the Guggenheim, the Library of Congress, and the Arthur C. Clarke Center for the Human Imagination. VanderMeer was born in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, but spent much of his childhood in the Fiji Islands, where his parents worked for the Peace Corps. This experience, and the resulting trip back to the United States through Asia, Africa, and Europe, deeply influenced him. Jeff is married to Ann VanderMeer, who is currently an acquiring editor at Tor.com and has won the Hugo Award and World Fantasy Award for her editing of magazines and anthologies. They live in Tallahassee, Florida, with two cats and thousands of books.

Author of five novels: The Swan Gondola, The Coffins of Little Hope, Devils in the Sugar Shop, The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God, and The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters. Director of the (downtown) omaha lit fest. Contributing editor, Fairy Tale Review. Assistant Professor in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln creative writing program. "The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God" is part of the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers program, and was the 2007 Omaha Reads one-book-one-city selection. "Devils in the Sugar Shop" was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a Book Sense pick.

"Alexander Chee is the best new novelist I've seen in some time. Edinburgh is moody, dramatic - and pure."—Edmund White “A complex, sophisticated, elegant investigation of trauma and desire - like a white hot flame.”—Joyce Hackett, in The Guardian “A coming-of-age novel in the grand Romantic tradition, where passions run high, Cupid stalks Psyche, and love shares the dance floor with death . . . A lovely, nuanced, never predictable portrait of a creative soul in the throes of becoming.”—Washington Post Book World Alexander Chee was born in South Kingston, RI, and raised in South Korea, Guam, Truk and Maine. He attended Wesleyan University and the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, an NEA Fellowship in Fiction, fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and was the Visiting Writer at Amherst College from 2006-2010. His first novel, Edinburgh, won the Michener, the AAWW Lit Award, the Lambda Editor's Choice Prize and was named a Booksense 76 Pick and a Publisher's Weekly Best Book of the Year. His second novel, The Queen of the Night, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2011. He lives in New York City.

Joshua Beckman was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of six books, including Take It (Wave Books, 2009), Shake and two collaborations with Matthew Rohrer: Nice Hat. Thanks. and Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He is an editor at Wave Books and has translated numerous works of poetry and prose, including Poker by Tomaz Salamun, which was a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Award. He is also the recipient of numerous other awards, including a NYFA fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Seattle and New York. For more information on this author, go to: http://www.wavepoetry.com/authors/31-...

Michael A. Martone is a professor at the creative writing program at the University of Alabama, and is the author of several books. His most recent work, titled Michael Martone and originally written as a series of contributor's notes for various publications, is an investigation of form and autobiography. A former student of John Barth, Martone's work is critically regarded as powerful and funny. Making use of Whitman's catalogues and Ginsberg's lists, the events, moments and places in Martone's landscapes—fiction or otherwise—often take the same Mobius-like turns of the threads found the works of his mentor, Barth.

Johannes Göransson is interested in approaches to writing that crosses boundaries – such as genre conventions and linguistic borders – and blurs the demarcations of the autonomous text. He is the author of three books of his own writings – A New Quarantine Will Take My Place, Dear Ra and Pilot (Johann the Carousel Horse) – with one more forthcoming in 2011, The Entrance Pageant. He wrote a performance piece The Widow Party, which was performed at Links Hall in Chicago in 2008. He is also the translator of the works of several modern and contemporary Swedish and Finland Swedish poets and writers – including Aase Berg, Henry Parland and Johan Jönson. He has written critically about contemporary American and Swedish poetry, translation theory, the historical avant-garde, Sylvia Plath, and Gurlesque poetry and other neo-gothic aesthetics. In addition, he has a special interest in film, particularly the 1960s underground cinema of Kenneth Anger and Jack Smith. Together with Joyelle McSweeney, Johannes publishes Action Books; and together with McSweeney and John Woods, he edits the online zine Action, Yes. ”For me poetry is inextricably bound up in issues of immigration, homelessness, translation.” Interview: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/mainte...

Willy Vlautin (born 1967) is an American author and the lead singer and songwriter of Portland, Oregon band Richmond Fontaine. Born and raised in Reno, Nevada, he has released nine studio albums since the late nineties with his band while he has written four novels: The Motel Life, Northline, Lean on Pete, and The Free. Published in the US, several European and Asian countries, Vlautin's first book, The Motel Life was well received. It was an editor's choice in the New York Times Book Review and named one of the top 25 books of the year by the Washington Post. His second, Northline was also critically hailed, and Vlautin was declared an important new American literary realist. Famed writer George Pelecanos stated that Northline was his favorite book of the decade. The first edition of this novel came with an original instrumental soundtrack performed by Vlautin and longtime bandmate Paul Brainard. Vlautin's third novel, Lean on Pete, is the story of a 15-year-old boy who works and lives on a rundown race track in Portland, Oregon and befriends a failed race horse named Lean on Pete. The novel won two Oregon Book Awards: the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction and the Peoples Choice Award. As a novelist, Vlautin has cited writers such as John Steinbeck, Raymond Carver, Barry Gifford, and William Kennedy as influences. HIs writing is highly evocative of the American West; all three of his novels being set in and around Oregon, Nevada and New Mexico. His books explore the circumstances and relationships of people near the bottom of America's social and economic spectrum, itinerant, and often ailed by alcohol addiction.

David J. Schwartz carries Minnesota with him in a small camel-colored attaché with a combination lock; it can only be opened by taking the number of hairs on F. Scott Fitzgerald's head, dividing it by the secret formula on the Kensington Runestone, and adding the ghostly cry of a loon (usually a negative number). If found, please return to the nearest person wearing flannel. Because his luggage is full of lakes, he keeps his stories in his head. Sometimes they make it onto paper. They have appeared in numerous publications, including the anthologies Fantasy: Best of the Year 2007, The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet and the World Fantasy award-nominated Twenty Epics. You can also read several of his stories online: "The Water-Poet and the Four Seasons", "Oma Dortchen and the Pillar of Story", "Iron Ankles, "Screen", "The Colossus Vignettes", "The New Year's Party, "Vagina Music", "The Love Thing" and "The Lethe Man". David has lived in Chicago and Madison, Wisconsin; he now resides in Saint Paul, where he was born and raised. He holds a BA in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a Master's in Library Science from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He would like to set them down somewhere, but not before he figures out a way to use them. He likes oversteeped tea, feeling superior for not owning a car, and streets paved with brick. David is so excited about his first novel that he is constantly nauseated. Help him keep his lunch down by ordering a copy of Superpowers from Amazon or Amazon UK.

Born Robert Lowell Coover in Charles City, Iowa, Coover moved with his family early in his life to Herrin, Illinois, where his father was the managing editor for the Herrin Daily Journal. Emulating his father, Coover edited and wrote for various school newspapers under the nom-de-plume “Scoop.” He was also his high-school class president, a school band member, and an enthusiastic supporter of the Cincinnati Reds. In 1949 Coover enrolled in Southern Illinois University, and, after transferring to Indiana University in 1951, earned his bachelor's degree in 1953 with a major in Slavonic languages. While in college, he continued editing student papers, as well as working part-time for his father's newspaper. The day he graduated, Coover received his draft notice and went on to serve in the U.S. Naval Reserve during the Korean War, attaining the rank of lieutenant. Upon his discharge in 1957, Coover devoted himself to fiction. During the summer of that year, he spent a month sequestered in a cabin near the Canadian border, where he studied the work of Samuel Beckett and committed himself to writing serious avant-garde fiction. In 1958, he travelled to Spain, where he reunited with Maria del Pilar Sans-Mallafré, whom he had earlier met while serving a military tour in Europe. The couple married in 1959 and spent the summer touring southern Europe by motorcycle, an experience he described in “One Summer in Spain: Five Poems,” his first published work. Between 1958 and 1961, Coover studied at the University of Chicago, eventually receiving his master's degree in 1965. The Coovers lived in Spain for most of the early 1960s, a time during which Coover began regularly publishing stories in literary magazines, including the Evergreen Review. In 1966, after the couple returned to the United States, Coover took a teaching position at Bard College in New York. He also published his first novel, The Origin of the Brunists (1966), which won the William Faulkner Award for best first novel. In 1969, Coover won a Rockefeller Foundation grant and published Pricksongs and Descants, his first collection of short fiction. That year, he also wrote, produced, and directed a movie, On a Confrontation in Iowa City (1969). Coover has maintained an interest in film throughout his career. During the early 1970s, Coover published only short stories and drama, including A Theological Position (1972), a collection of one-act plays, all of which were eventually produced for the stage. He also won Guggenheim fellowships in 1971 and 1974, and served as fiction editor for the Iowa Review from 1974 to 1977. By the mid-1970s, Coover had finished his next novel, The Public Burning; it took him more than two years to find a publisher for the work, which was ultimately cited as a National Book Award nominee. Coover received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1985 and a Rea Award for A Night at the Movies (1987), a collection of short stories. While Coover concentrated primarily on short fiction—with the exception of Gerald's Party—during the 1980s, he produced a series of new novels during the 1990s. Coover has taught at a number of universities, including the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Princeton University, and Brandeis University, throughout his career. Since 1981 he has been a writer-in-residence and faculty member of the creative writing program at Brown University. Among the vanguard of American postmodern writers to come of age during the late 1960s, Coover is respected as a vital experimentalist whose challenging work continues to offer insight into the nature of literary creation, narrative forms, and cultural myths. Convinced early in his career that traditional fictional modes were exhausted, Coover has pioneered a variety of inventive narrative techniques, notably complex metafictional structures and ludic pastiches of various genres to satirize contemporary American society and the role of the author. In this wa

Christopher Barzak is the author of the Crawford Fantasy Award winning novel One for Sorrow which has been made into the Sundance feature film Jamie Marks is Dead. His second novel, The Love We Share Without Knowing, was a finalist for the Nebula Award and the James Tiptree Jr. Award. His third novel, Wonders of the Invisible World, received the Stonewall Honor from the American Library Association and most recently was selected for inclusion on the Human Rights Campaign’s list of books for libraries in LGBTQ welcoming schools. He is also the author of three short story collections: Birds and Birthdays, a collection of surrealist fantasy stories, Before and Afterlives, a collection of supernatural fantasies, which won Best Collection in the 2013 Shirley Jackson Awards, and Monstrous Alterations. His most recent novel, The Gone Away Place, received the inaugural Whippoorwill Award, and was selected for the Choose to Read Ohio program by the State Library of Ohio, the Ohioana Library Association, and the Ohio Center for the Book. Christopher grew up in rural Kinsman, Ohio, has lived in the southern California beach town of Carlsbad, and the capital of Michigan; he taught English outside of Tokyo, Japan, where he lived for two years. He teaches creative writing at Youngstown State University, in Youngstown, Ohio.