Charles Bock was born in Las Vegas, where his family has owned and operated pawn shops for the past thirty years. His first novel, Beautiful Children (Random House, 2008), was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won the 2009 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Bock also received the Silver Pen Award (Nevada Writers Hall of Fame) in 2009. He has previously held fellowships at Yaddo, Ucross, and the Vermont Studio Center, and received a 2011 residency from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy. Bock earned his MFA in creative writing from Bennington College and has taught creative writing at the Gotham Writers Workshop in New York City. He currently resides with his wife and daughter in Brooklyn. Kelle Groom is the author of three poetry collections and the memoir I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, June 2011), which is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection for Fall 2011. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including The New Yorker, Witness, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Groom received a Florida Book Award in 2006 and 2010 and has been awarded grants from the State of Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, New Forms Florida, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She has served as the Norma Millay Ellis Fellow at the Millay Colony for the Arts, the William Randolph Hearst Foundation Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, and has received residency fellowships from Atlantic Center for the Arts and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Groom has taught writing at the University of Central Florida and is a contributing editor for The Florida Review. She lives in Florida. Kris Saknussemm is an Australian-American novelist and media artist. Educated at Dartmouth with an M.A. from the University of Washington, Saknussemm has published three novels and a short story collection. His first novel, Zanesville (Villard Books, a division of Random House, 2005), became a modern science fiction cult classic. His work has appeared in such publications as The Boston Review, The Hudson Review, The Antioch Review, New Letters, and Prairie Schooner. He was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in 2004. A champion of outsider art, Saknussemm’s writing is known for its bizarre imagery and fierce satire. He is also a painter and sculptor. He divides his time between the West Coast of America and the old goldfields region outside of Melbourne.