Nick Flynn is an American poet, memoirist, and playwright. His most famous book is a memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. He has published two collections of poetry: Blind Huber, and Some Ether, which won the inaugural PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Further honors include a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2001 Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and the 1999 Discovery/The Nation Award for his poem, Bag of Mice, about his mother's suicide. Flynn earned an Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from New York University and teaches part-time at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. He used to teach at Columbia University, where he was a poet and educator. He lives in New York and is married to the actress, Lili Taylor, with whom he has a daughter, Maeve. Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

D. A. Powell is the author of Tea, Lunch, Cocktails, Chronic and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry in 2013. Repast, Powell's latest, collects his three early books in a handsome volume introduced by novelist David Leavitt. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Powell lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Follow D. A. Powell on Twitter: Powell_DA

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. Stephen Elliott is the author of seven books including Happy Baby, a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award, as well as a Best Book of 2004 in Salon.com, Newsday, Chicago New City, Journal News, and Village Voice. Elliott's writing has been featured in Esquire, The New York Times, GQ, Best American Non-Required Reading 2005 & 2007, Best American Erotica, and Best Sex Writing 2006. He is the editor of Where To Invade Next and three collections of politically inspired fiction. In January, 2009, he founded the online culture magazine, The Rumpus."

Dorothy Allison is an American writer, speaker, and member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Themes in Allison's work include class struggle, child and sexual abuse, women, lesbianism, feminism, and family. Allison's first novel, the semi-autobiographical Bastard Out of Carolina, was published in 1992 and was one of five finalists for the 1992 National Book Award. Allison founded The Independent Spirit Award in 1998, a prize given annually to an individual whose work within the small press and independent bookstore circuit has helped sustain that enterprise.