Diana Abu-Jaber moved to Jordan for two years with her American mother and Jordanian father when she was seven. She has lived between the U.S. and Jordan since, acting Arab at home but American elsewhere in the U.S. The struggle to make sense of this sort of hybrid life, or “in-betweenness,” permeates Abu-Jaber’s fiction. Her most recent novel, Origin, explores issues of memory and identity. Abu-Jaber’s writing has earned her the PEN Center USA Award for Literary Fiction, the American Book Award, and the Oregon Book Award among others, and she has been a Pushcart Prize finalist for her short fiction. She has taught creative writing, film studies and contemporary literature at a number of universities, including The University of Oregon, UCLA, and Portland State University. Her stories, editorials and book, film and food reviews have appeared in publications such as Ploughshares, the North American Review, Story, Good Housekeeping, Ms., Salon, Gourmet, The Nation, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Time. She is frequently featured on National Public Radio.

Joseph Bathanti grew up in Pittsburgh and came back to North Carolina in 1976 as a VISTA volunteer to work in the state's prison system. He is the author of four books of poetry, the most recent of which, This Metal, was nominated for the National Book Award, as well as two novels, East Liberty and Coventry, for which he received the 2006 Novello Literary Award. Most recently, his collection of short stories, The High Heart, winner of the 2007 Spokane Prize, was published by Eastern Washington University Press in Fall 2007. The recipient of numerous other honors, among them the Linda Flowers Prize, the Sara Henderson Hay Prize, and the Sherwood Anderson Award, he teaches creative writing at Appalachian State University.

Jennifer Davis was born and raised in Alabama, where she grew up exploring the banks of Lake Martin and the Tallapoosa River. “Davis shares with other southern female short-story writers, such as Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty, a sense of relish of the absurdity running through the human condition,” wrote Booklist. Her stories have been published or are forthcoming in such journals as Grand Street, Paris Review, Epoch, Georgia Review, One Story, Oxford American, Fiction, and Shenandoah, among others. Her first collection of short stories, Her Kind of Want, was the winner of the Iowa Award for Short Fiction. Our Former Lives in Art, her new collection, was selected by Barnes & Noble for its Discover Great New Writers series, and of it Publishers Weekly wrote: “Davis creates magnificently conflicted characters with low key stylistic panache.” Formerly a teacher in the MFA program at Eastern Washington University, she currently teaches at the University of Colorado at Denver where she serves as a faculty editor of Copper Nickel, a journal of art and literature.

Novelist, journalist, and witty, no-nonsense social commentator, Karen Karbo is the author, most recently of How to Hepburn: Lessons on Living from Kate the Great, a biography-cum-guidebook the Philadelphia Inquirer called “an exuberant celebration of a great original.” Karbo is also the author of the Minerva Clark Gives Up the Ghost, the third installment in a trilogy about a seventh-grade girl detective who has a peculiar gift: self-confidence. Karbo’s debut novel, Trespassers Welcome Here, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and all three of her novels have been named New York Times notable books. The Stuff of Life, her memoir about her father, was a People Magazine Critic’s Pick and winner of the Oregon Book Award. Her essays, reviews, and articles can be found in Outside, Elle, Vogue, Esquire, Redbook, More, Self, Entertainment Weekly, the New Republic, the Oregonian, and the New York Times. Karbo lives in Portland, Oregon.

Elinor Langer is the author of a Special Issue of The Nation on Hawaiian history titled “‘Famous are the Flowers’: Hawaiian Resistance Then—and Now” which will be published in early April, 2008, just in time for Get Lit!. Her book about the 1988 skinhead killing of an Ethiopian man in Portland, A Hundred Little Hitlers, was chosen as a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Award for work-in-progress and was a finalist for the Book of the Month Club’s Best Non-Fiction Book that year. An award-winning writer, Langer’s work has appeared in such publications as the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, The Nation, and Mother Jones, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Bunting Institute, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Open Society Institute, among others. She is also the author of a biography of the American radical novelist and journalist Josephine Herbst, which was nominated for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in 1984. Langer has taught at Goddard, Reed, Portland State, and Lewis and Clark’s Northwest Writing Institute, and was a starting member of the faculty of the Mountain Writers Pacific Low Residency MFA program. She lives in Portland.

Dorianne Laux worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, and a maid before receiving a BA in English from Mills College in 1988. Shortly thereafter, the publication of Awake (BOA Editions, 1990) marked her brilliant debut as a poet. Awake was followed by two more collections, also from BOA: What We Carry (1994), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Smoke (2000). Her fourth volume of poems, Facts About the Moon (W. W. Norton, 2005), won the Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the 2006 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. In 2007 Eastern Washington University Press reissued Awake, long out of print, and Red Dragonfly Press has just released a letterpress edition of six new poems: Superman: The Chapbook (2008). Born in Augusta, Maine, Laux moved to northern California in 1983 and in 1994 settled in Eugene, Oregon, where she is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon. She is the recipient of many honors, including an Editor’s Choice III Award, two Best American Poetry prizes, and two Pushcart prizes. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, and she is among the poets to earn a place in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. In 2001 she was invited by the late poet laureate Stanley Kunitz to read at the Library of Congress. About Laux's work, the poet Tony Hoagland has written: "Her poems are those of a grown American woman, one who looks clearly, passionately, and affectionately at rites of passage, motherhood, the life of work, sisterhood, and especially sexual love, in a celebratory fashion." Laux lives in Eugene with her husband, poet Joseph Millar.

Glen Moore is a jazz bassist whose career has spanned the last four decades. His performing career began at age 14 with the Young Oregonians in Portland. He holds a degree in history and literature from the University of Oregon where he also studied cello. Moore is one of the founding members of the eclectic ensemble Oregon, which has been delighting audiences since the early seventies. His is known for his thoughtful and melodic improvisations that reveal influences of folk, classical, and ethnic music and create an introspective mood—the ideal counterpoint to poetry.

Katrina Roberts, a graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is a Paul Garrett Fellow and the Mina Schwabacher Associate Professor of English and the Humanities at Whitman College, where she also directs the Visiting Writers Reading Series. Her first book of poems, How Late Desire Looks, won the Peregrine Smith Prize. The Quick, her second book, was chosen by Linda Bierds for the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her third book, Friendly Fire, was selected by Robin Becker as the winner of the Idaho Prize for Poetry 2007. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals and anthologies such as Ploughshares; Northwest Review; New England Review; The Journal; New Orleans Review; Runes; Sonora Review; Best American Poetry; The Pushcart Book of Poetry: The Best Poems from the First 30 Years of the Pushcart Prize; The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology; Never Before: Poems About First Experiences; The Pushcart Prize Anthology XXII; The Long Journey: Pacific Northwest Poets; and Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction. She and her husband are the proprietors of and winemakers for Tytonidae Cellars in Walla Walla, Washington, where they live with their three small children.

Carole Lexa Schaefer is an acclaimed children's book author who has published more than twenty picture books and easy readers that have garnered numerous awards. Down in the Woods at Sleepytime, for example, won the 2001 Washington State Book Award. Schaefer earned a B.S. in Education and American and English Literature and an M.A. in Early Childhood Education. As an educator/author, she gives presentations of her books, the uses of language, and related topics to both children and adults. In addition to many classroom visits, she has presented to the American Library Association, the Association of American English Teachers, the Conference of Whole Language Teachers, and the International Reading Association. Schaefer resides on Camano Island, Washington.

Michael Wiegers has been working in the independent book business for two decades. A former bookseller, he started his publishing career at Coffee House Press, after years of volunteering as a printer’s devil and manuscript reader. For the past fifteen years he has worked at Copper Canyon Press, where he currently serves as executive editor. Additionally, he is the poetry editor of Narrative Magazine and has edited three anthologies, including Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry , and This Art . He lives with his partner and their daughter in Port Townsend, Washington.

David Wojahn, the author of seven volumes of poetry to date, was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1953 and educated at the University of Minnesota and the University of Arizona. His first collection, Icehouse Lights , which appeared in 1982, was chosen by Richard Hugo as a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize and also won the William Carlos Williams Book Award, presented by the Poetry Society of America. Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems, 1982–2004, his most recent collection, was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the O. B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library. He is also the author of Strange Good Fortune ( University of Arkansas Press, 2001), a collection of essays on contemporary poetry, and coeditor, with Jack Myers, of A Profile of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991). He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Illinois and Indiana Councils for the Arts, and in 1987–88 was the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholar. He has taught at a number of institutions, among them Indiana University, the University of Chicago, the University of Houston, the University of Alabama, and the University of New Orleans. He is presently professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and is also a member of the program faculty of the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College.

Feminist, social critic and political activist Naomi Wolf raises awareness of the pervasive inequities that exist in politics and society and encourages people to take charge of their lives, voice their concerns, and enact change. Her latest book, The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (Sept. 2007), is an impassioned call to return to the aspirations and beliefs of the Founding Fathers. Wolf shows how events of the last six years are undermining the U.S. democracy by comparing them to parallel steps taken in the early years of the 20th century's worst dictatorships. Wolf’s landmark international bestseller, The Beauty Myth, challenged the cosmetics industry and the marketing of unrealistic standards of beauty, launching a new wave of feminism in the early 1990s. The New York Times called it one of the most important books of the 20th century. Will her new book have an even greater impact? Are we in the last days of our democracy? Read The End of America and join the sure-to-be provocative discussion at Get Lit!.

Born in Alabama in 1945, Tobias Wolff traveled the country with his mother, finally settling in Washington State , where he grew up. He attended the Hill School in Pennsylvania until he was expelled for repeated failures in mathematics in his final year, whereupon he joined the Army. He spent four years as a paratrooper, including a tour in Vietnam . Following his discharge he attended Oxford University in England , where he received a First Class Honors degree in English in 1972. Returning to the United States , he worked variously as a reporter, a night watchman, a waiter and a high school teacher before receiving a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University in 1975. He is currently Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the Humanities at Stanford, where he lives with his wife Catherine. They have three children. Tobias Wolff’s books include the memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army; the short novel The Barracks Thief; three collections of stories, In The Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, and The Night in Question; and, most recently, the novel Old School. He has also edited several anthologies, among them Best American Short Stories, A Doctor’sVisit: The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov, and The Vintage Book of Contemporary AmericanStories. His work is translated widely and has received numerous awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, both the PEN/Malamud and the Rea Awards for Excellence in the Short Story, and the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.