by Tales of Two Americas- Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation (retail) (epub)
Eula Biss is the author of Notes from No Man’s Land, winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, as well as On Immunity and The Balloonists. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, and The Believer, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading and The Best Creative Nonfiction. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and she has won the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation. Biss teaches at Northwestern University and lives in Chicago.
Sandra Cisneros is the author of two highly celebrated novels, a story collection, two books of poetry, a memoir, and Have You Seen Marie? She is the recipient of numerous awards, including National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Lannan Literary Award, the American Book Award, the Thomas Wolfe Prize, and a MacArthur fellowship. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Cisneros is the founder of the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral and Macondo foundations, which serve creative writers.
Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah’s Book Club selection; Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist; The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner; and the novel in stories The Dew Breaker. She is the editor of The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, The Beacon Best of 2000: Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors and Cultures, Haiti Noir and Haiti Noir 2, and The Best American Essays 2011. She has written six books for young adults and children, Anacaona: Golden Flower, Haiti, 1490; Behind the Mountains; Eight Days; The Last Mapou; Mama’s Nightingale; and Untwine; as well as a travel narrative, After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti. Her memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award and the 2008 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow.
RS Deeren was the 2016 Union League Club of Chicago Library’s Writer in Residence. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry appear in the Great Lakes Review, Midwestern Gothic, The Legendary, the Corvus Review, and elsewhere. Before moving to Chicago to earn his MFA in fiction from Columbia College Chicago, he lived in the rural Thumb Region of Michigan working as a line cook, bank teller, teacher, and lumberjack.
Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press. She is a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Artist Fellow. She was awarded a Bread Loaf fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, a Hodder fellowship, and a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation residency, as well as being awarded a U.S. Artists Ford fellowship. Diaz teaches in the Arizona State University MFA program. She splits her time between the East Coast and Mohave Valley, Arizona, where she works to revitalize the Mojave language.
Annie Dillard has written twelve books, including the nonfiction titles For the Time Being, Teaching a Stone to Talk, Holy the Firm, and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Anthony Doerr was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. He is the author of the story collections The Shell Collector and Memory Wall, the memoir Four Seasons in Rome, and the novels About Grace and All the Light We Cannot See, which was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, a New York Times columnist, a winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, and the author of eight books, most recently The Immortal Irishman. His previous books include The Worst Hard Time, which won a National Book Award, and the national best seller The Big Burn. A third-generation westerner, he lives in Seattle.
Patricia Engel’s most recent book, The Veins of the Ocean, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She is also the author of Vida, a New York Times Notable Book of 2010 and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Fiction Award and the Young Lions Fiction Award; and It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris, winner of the International Latino Book Award. Her books have been translated into several languages and her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, A Public Space, Boston Review, and The Best American Mystery Stories 2014, among other publications, and honors she has received include a fellowship in literature from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Miami.
Ru Freeman’s creative and political writing has appeared internationally. She is the author of the novels A Disobedient Girl (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2009) and On Sal Mal Lane (Graywolf, 2013), a New York Times Editors’ Choice book. Both novels have been translated into several languages including Italian, French, Hebrew, and Chinese. She is the editor of the groundbreaking anthology Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine (2015). She blogs for the Huffington Post on literature and politics, is a contributing editorial board member of the Asian American Literary Review, and has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Lannan Foundation. She is the 2014 winner of the Sister Mariella Gable Award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for fiction by an American woman.
Roxane Gay is the author of the novel An Untamed State, which was a finalist for the Dayton Peace Prize for fiction; the essay collection Bad Feminist; the short story volume Difficult Women; Ayiti, a multigenre collection; and Hunger, a memoir. She is at work on a comic book in Marvel’s Black Panther series. Her writing has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2012, The York Times, The Guardian, and many others. She is a recipient of the PEN Center USA Freedom to Write Award, among many other honors. She splits her time between Indiana and Los Angeles.
Dagoberto Gilb is the author of Before the End, After the Beginning; Woodcuts of Women; The Magic of Blood; and others. He has been published in Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, Zyzzyva, and many more. He founded the magazine Huizache to promote Latino literature centered in America’s West.
In 2015 Juan Felipe Herrera was appointed the twenty-first United States Poet Laureate, the first Mexican American to hold the position. Herrera grew up in California as the son of migrant farmers, which, he has commented, strongly shaped much of his work. He is the author of thirty books, including collections of poetry, prose, short stories, young adult novels, and picture books for children. His collections of poetry include Notes on the Assemblage (City Lights, 2015); Senegal Taxi (University of Arizona, 2013); Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (University of Arizona, 2008), a recipient of the PEN Beyond Margins Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border: Undocuments 1971–2007 (City Lights, 2007); and CrashBoomLove: A Novel in Verse (University of New Mexico, 1999), which received the Américas Award. In 2014, he released the nonfiction work Portraits of Hispanic American Heroes (Dial), which showcases twenty Hispanic and Latino American men and women who have made outstanding contributions to the arts, politics, science, humanitarianism, and athletics in the United States.
Lawrence Joseph’s sixth book of poems, So Where Are We?, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2017. He is also the author of two books of prose, Lawyerland (FSG, 1997) and The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose (University of Michigan, 2011). He is Tinnelly Professor of Law at St. John’s University School of Law and lives in New York City.
Rickey Laurentiis was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is the recipient of numerous honors, among them a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy. In 2016, he traveled to Palestine as a part of the Palestine Festival of Literature. His first book, Boy with Thorn (2015), won t
he 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the 2016 Levis Reading Prize, and was a finalist for a 2016 Lambda Literary Award and the Thom Gunn Award from the Publishing Triangle. He teaches at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College.
Kiese Laymon is a black Southern writer born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. He is the author of the novel Long Division, the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and the forthcoming memoir Heavy.
Nami Mun grew up in Seoul, South Korea, and Bronx, New York. For her first book, Miles from Nowhere, she received a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, The Hopwood Award, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers and the Asian American Literary Award. Miles from Nowhere was selected as Editors’ Choice and Top 10 First Novels by Booklist; Best Fiction of 2009 So Far by Amazon; and as an Indie Next pick. Previously, Nami has worked as an Avon lady, a street vendor, a photojournalist, a waitress, an activities coordinator for a nursing home, and a criminal defense investigator. After earning a GED, she went on to receive degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan, and has garnered fellowships from organizations such as Yaddo, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Tin House. Her writing can be found in The New York Times, Granta, Tin House, The Iowa Review, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Evergreen Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago with her husband, the novelist Augustus Rose, and their son.
Manuel Muñoz is the author of two collections of short stories, Zigzagger and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue. His first novel, What You See in the Dark, was published in 2011. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Whiting Award, and two PEN/O. Henry prizes, his work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Glimmer Train, Epoch, American Short Fiction, and Boston Review, and has aired on National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts. Muñoz has been on the faculty of the University of Arizona’s creative writing program since 2008.
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She is Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. In 2016, she was inducted into the American Philosophical Society.
Chris Offutt is the author of the short story collections Kentucky Straight and Out of the Woods; the novel The Good Brother; and three memoirs, The Same River Twice, No Heroes, and My Father, the Pornographer. His work is included in many anthologies and textbooks, including The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Essays. He has written screenplays for Weeds, True Blood, and Treme, and has received fellowships from the Lannan and Guggenheim foundations. He lives near Oxford, Mississippi.
Ann Patchett is the author of seven novels, The Patron Saint of Liars, Taft, The Magician’s Assistant, Bel Canto, Run, State of Wonder, and Commonwealth. She was the editor of The Best American Short Stories 2006, and has written three books of nonfiction, Truth & Beauty, about her friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy; What Now?, an expansion of her graduation address at Sarah Lawrence College; and This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, a collection of essays examining the theme of commitment. In November 2011, she opened Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee, with her business partner, Karen Hayes.
Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of Night at the Fiestas, a New York Times Notable Book, which received a 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation, the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches at Princeton University.
Over the past five years, Jess Ruliffson has traveled across the United States interviewing veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, documenting the returning war wounded at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, and listening to stories at kitchen tables in Georgia, libraries in New York, dive bars in Mississippi, and back porches in Vermont. She has given lectures about these experiences at the Drawing Center and the Center for Cartoon Studies. Her work has been published by Pantheon Books, the Columbia School of Journalism, Wilson Quarterly, Oxford American, and the Boston Globe. She lives in Florida and teaches at the Sequential Artists Workshop. For more, visit www.jessruliffson.com.
Karen Russell is the author of the story collections St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Vampires in the Lemon Grove, the novella Sleep Donation, and the novel Swamplandia!. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Richard Russo is the author of nine novels, most recently the best-selling Everybody’s Fool and That Old Cape Magic, two short story collections, and the memoir Elsewhere. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls. He lives in Portland, Maine.
Sarah Smarsh is a journalist who has reported on public policy and socioeconomic class for The New Yorker and Harper’s Online, The Guardian, Guernica, and others. Her essays on cultural boundaries have been published by Aeon, McSweeney’s, the Morning News, Creative Nonfiction, Vela, and the Texas Observer. Smarsh’s book on the American working poor and her upbringing in rural Kansas is forthcoming from Scribner. She lives in Kansas.
Danez Smith is the author of [insert] boy, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award. He was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. His second poetry collection, Don’t Call Us Dead, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in September 2017.
Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of eighteen books on environment, landscape, representation, disaster, politics, hope, and feminism, including a trilogy of atlases and the books Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at Harper’s.
Whitney Terrell is the author of three novels, The Huntsman, The King of King’s County, and The Good Lieutenant. He was an embedded reporter in Iraq during 2006 and 2010 and covered the war for The Washington Post Magazine, Slate, and NPR. He teaches creative writing at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and lives nearby with his family.
Héctor Tobar is the author of four books, including the critically acclaimed New York Times best seller Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine and the Miracle That Set Them Free, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Claire Vaye Watkins is the author of the story collection Battleborn and the novel Gold Fame Citrus. She was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 fiction writer, and has been awarded the Story Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, and a Guggenheim fellowship. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, One Story, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Best of the West 2011, Best of the West 2013, and elsewhere. Watkins teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with her husband, the writer Derek Palacio, with whom she cofounded the Mojave School, a creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada.
Brad Watson was born in Meridian, Mississippi, and has lived there, as well as in Alabama, Boston, California, and, most recently, Wyoming, where he teaches in the University of Wyoming creative writing program. He previously taught at the University of Alabama; Harvard; the University of West Florida; Ole Miss; and the University of California, Irvine. His books are Last Days of the Dog-Men, The Heaven of Mercury, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, and Miss Jane, all from W. W. N
orton & Co. His work has received two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an NEA grant, and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. Aliens was a finalist for the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Mercury received the Southern Book Critics Circle Award and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Fiction (as did Aliens), and was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award. He lives with his wife, Nell Hanley, and their dogs and horses on the prairie south of Laramie, Wyoming.
Larry Watson is the author of the novels Montana 1948, American Boy, Let Him Go, and others, including the most recent, As Good as Gone. He teaches writing and literature at Marquette University in Milwaukee.
Joy Williams is the author of four novels, five story collections, and the book of essays Ill Nature. She’s been nominated for the National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Critics Circle Award. Her most recent book is Ninety-nine Stories of God. She lives in Tuscon, Arizona, and Laramie, Wyoming.
Kevin Young is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose, most recently Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995–2015, longlisted for the National Book Award, and Book of Hours, which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. He is director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and incoming Poetry Editor of The New Yorker.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Death by Gentrification” by Rebecca Solnit first appeared in The Guardian. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“i’m sick of pretending to give a shit about what whypeepo think” by Danez Smith, copyright © 2017 by Danez Smith.
“Notes of a Native Daughter” by Sandra Cisneros, copyright © 2016 by Sandra Cisneros, first delivered for the Hispanic Housing Development Corporation, Chicago, March 2016, and first appeared in print in Chicago magazine, August 2016.
