Susan Daitch has written two novels, L.C. (which was a Lannan Foundation Selection and an NEA recipient for their Heritage/Preservation award) and The Colorist. She has also written a collection of stories, Storytown. Her work was the subject of a “Review of Contemporary Fiction” featured with David Foster Wallace and William Vollman. Her short stories have appeared in Bomb, failbetter.com, McSweeney’s, Tin House, The Brooklyn Rail, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction.
Amy Hempel is the author of four collections of stories, which were published together as one volume in 2006. THE COLLECTED STORIES was a finalist for the PEN Faulkner Award, won the Ambassador Book Award, and was one of the New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year. Her stories have appeared in many anthologies, including The Best American Stories, The Pushcart Prize and The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Hempel teaches at Sarah Lawrence, Princeton and Bennington. She lives in New York City.
Jim Shepard is the author of six novels, including most recently Project X (Knopf, 2004) and three story collections, including most recently Like You’d Understand, Anyway (a finalist for the 2007
National Book Award) and Love and Hydrogen (Vintage, 2004). His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Granta, the New Yorker and Playboy, and he is a columnist on film for the magazine The Believer. A third story collection, Like You’d Understand Anyway, and a collection of his film essays, Heroes in Disguise, will appear in 2007. He teaches at Williams College and in the Warren Wilson MFA program.
Elliott Sharp - Composer/multi-insrumentalist/sound artist Elliott Sharp leads Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane. His compositions have been performed by the Symphony of the Hessischer Rundfunk, The Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Rezonanz, Continuum, Meridian Arts Ensemble, Flux Quartet, Sirius Stirng Quartet, and Zeitkratzer and collaborators have included qawaali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, blues legend Hubert Sumlin; playwright Dael Orlandersmith, cello innovator Frances-Marie Uitti, sci-fi writers Pat Cadigan and Lucius Shepard; jazz greats Sonny Sharrock, Jack deJohnette, and Oliver Lake; and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians of Jahjoukah. His composition “Quarks Swim Free” was premiered at the Venice Biennale in September 2003 and his chamber opera EmPyre was premiered at the 2006 Biennale. He has recently completed the scores to the feature-films “What Sebastian Dreamt”", “Commune” by Jonathan Berman, and “Spectropia” by Toni Dove.
