John Crowley was born in 1942 in the appropriately liminal town of Presque Isle, Maine, USA, the son of an Army Air Corps doctor.  He grew up in several states, and has lived in various places since reaching adulthood, in New York and Massachusetts.  He worked at several occupations (photographer, publicist, television writer, hack) and began publishing novels in 1975.  He is a recipient of the American Academy and Institute of Letters Award for Literature and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award.  His critically acclaimed works include Little, Big, the Ægypt Cycle (The Solitudes, Love & Sleep, Dæmonomania, Endless Things), The Translator (winner of the Premio Flaiano, Italy), and Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land.  His most recent novel is Four Freedoms.  His stories are collected as Novelties & Souvenirs.  He is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Yale University, teaching fiction writing, screenwriting, and writing in the fantasy and SF genres. and screenwriting at Yale University.

Joseph Skibell

Josip Novakovich moved from Croatia to the U.S. at the age of twenty. He has published a novel, April Fool's Day, three story collections (Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust, Yolk, and Salvation and Other Disasters) and two collections of narrative essays as well as two books of practical criticism, including Fiction Writers Workshop. His work was anthologized in Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize collection, and O. Henry Prize Stories. He has received the Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Ingram Merrill Award, and an American Book Award, and he has been a writing fellow of the New York Public Library. He has taught at Bard, Die Freie Universitaet in Berlin, Penn State, and now, Concordia University in Montreal.

Robin Romm is the author of two books.  Her story collection, The Mother Garden, was a finalist for the PEN USA prize.  Her memoir about the last three weeks of her mother's life, The Mercy Papers, received many accolades upon publication, including a cover review in the New York Times Book Review, where it was also an Editor's Choice.  Her writing has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The UK Observer, Tin House, One Story, and The Threepenny Review.  She currently lives in Las Cruces, NM, where she teaches in the MFA program at New Mexico State University.

Laima Vincė is a graduate of Columbia University, School of the Arts MFA program in Creative Writing. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two Fulbright lectureships, a PEN Translation grant, and an Academy of American Poets award among other honours.
Writing under Laima Sruoginis, she is the editor and translator of three anthologies of contemporary Lithuanian literature: The Earth Remains (Columbia University Press), Lithuania In Her Own Words (Tito Alba), and Raw Amber (Poetry Salzburg). She has translated four books of literary non-fiction from Lithuanian into English.

Her novel for children, The Ghost in Hannah's Parlour was translated into Lithuanian and published by Gimtasis Zodis and was well received in Lithuania. In Autumn 2008, the Lithuanian Writers' Union Press will publish in English and Lithuanian Lenin's Head on a Platter (available for purchase here), a memoir of her year as a student at Vilnius University in 1988-1989 during the time of Lithuania's singing revolution. Laima Vincė also writes as a journalist on contemporary social issues in Lithuania.

This March Central European Univeristy Press will publish Laima Vincė's translation of the Lithuanian freeedom fighter, Juozas Lukša's account of Lithuania's post-war armed resistance against the Soviet Union. The book Forest Brothers includes authentic photographs from the post-war era, a detailed historical introduction written by Laima Vincė, and an afterword in which Laima Vincė describes Lukša's activities after his return to Lithuania in 1950 - 1951. The afterword depicts how fifty-five years after Lukša's death, his widow Nijolė Brazėnaitė meets for the first time the woman who hid and sheltered him after his return to Soviet-occupied Lithuania.

Mary Jo Bang is the author of six collections of poems, including Louise in Love, The Eye Like a Strange Balloon, and Elegy, winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her most recent book is The Bride of E (Graywolf Press 2009). She has been the recipient of a Bakeless Prize, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. Individual poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Paris Review, Denver Quarterly, Jubilat, three volumes of Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. She served as a poetry editor at Boston Review from 1995-2005 and has taught at the University of Montana, Columbia University, and the Iowa Writer's Workshop. She is currently a Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.

photo © Mark Schäfer

Sina Queyras is the author most recently of the poetry collections Lemon Hound (2006) and Expressway (2009) both from Coach House Books. She edited Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets, for Persea Books (2005), and continues to serve as contributing editor for Drunken Boat where she most recently edited a folio on conceptual fiction with Vanessa Place, and a folio on Visual Poetry with derek beaulieu. Lemon Hound won the Pat Lowther and a Lambda Literary award, Expressway won Gold in the National Magazine Awards and is nominated for a Governor General's Award. Her work has been published internationally in journals and anthologies. She has lived across Canada, in New Jersey, Brooklyn, Philadelphia and Montreal where she currently teaches at Concordia. She keeps a blog, Lemon Hound, which BookThug will publish a selection of writing from in 2009.

Louis Sachar was born in East Meadow, New York. He went on to the University of California in 1976 where he studied economics. It was whilst at University that in his spare time he became a teacher's aide to gain extra credit, but in fact it turned out to be his favourite class and inspired him to write children's books. After graduation he worked in a sweater warehouse in Connecticut and wrote at night. After he was fired from that job he moved onto law school where in his first week of study Sideways Stories From Wayside School was published. After completing his studies in 1980 he became a part-time lawyer but was compelled to concentrate on his writing full-time.

Once Sachar begins writing a new book he refuses to talk to anyone until it is finished and his office is also barred apart from his two dogs, Lucky and Tippy. He is inspired from various sources including his daughter and by events from own his childhood and the thoughts and feelings growing up. However, the idea for There's A Boy in the Girl's Bathroom came from his wife, who was working as a counsellor at an elementary school when he met her. Louis Sachar, now lives in Austin, Texas.

Louis Sachar has published many books for children in the USA and Holes was his first book to be published in the UK. Holes has won major American literary prizes, including the Newbery and the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, as well as being voted one of the BBC Big Read's top 100. It was selected by Waterstone's as one of their top 100 books of the last 25 years.

Bio coming soon

Darius J Ross is a Canadian transplant to Vilnius who, over the course of the past decade, has written and reported extensively on Lithuania for local and international English-language news media and leisure publications.

His freelance assignments have covered a wide array of topics – from reviews of Leonid Brezhnev's dacha on the Baltic coast (now a 5-star hotel) to magazine articles on Lithuanian heraldry and op-ed columns on the need for more public lavatories in the country.

During a three-year hiatus from his much loved but dysfunctional life as freelance Bohemian, he served as the Reuters reporter for Lithuania, a job that had him covering Europe's only successful impeachment of a head of state, interviewing government ministers and central bankers, and buttonholing visiting European dignitaries.

He has translated many texts and excerpts of Lithuanian literary prose, for the Vilnius Review and the annual 'Nordic Summer' literary forum, as well as for other events and publications.

He is currently living a Dickensian life of genteel poverty in the rough-and-tumble, working-class district of Karoliniškės where, during frequent and enjoyable walks with Bonnie, his beloved mongrel bitch, he basks in the wonders of Soviet urban planning, and where he has yet to encounter a single tourist.

Dovid Katz, professor at Vilnius University, and research director at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, is a specialist on Yiddish linguistics, literature and stylistics, and Lithuanian Jewish culture and literature. He has been developing Yiddish cultural programs for three decades. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1956, he is the son of Lithuanian-born Yiddish and English poet Menke Katz. He did his doctorate on the origins of the Yiddish language at the University of London, and founded the Yiddish program at Oxford, which he led for eighteen years. After a stint at Yale, he cofounded the Center for Stateless Cultures (1999) and the Vilnius Yiddish Institute (in 2001). He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Manger Award for Yiddish Literature and the John Marshall Prize in Comparative Philology.

His books include Lithuanian Jewish Culture (2004), Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish (2007), Windows to a Lost Jewish Past: Vilna Book Stamps (2008) and Seven Kingdoms of the Litvaks (2009). He has published dozens of papers in Yiddish linguistics, and on Yiddish stylistics.

He also writes short stories in Yiddish; three collections have appeared to date, and a fourth is ready for the press. An anthology of stories in English, selected, edited and translated by Dr. Barnett Zumoff of New York, is near completion. For several years in the 1990s, he edited the world’s only literary Yiddish monthly, and he continues to contribute non-fiction and fiction to the New York weekly Algemeyner Zhurnal.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, he has been leading expeditions to find, interview and support the last prewar Jews of Eastern Europe. One academic product is his language and culture atlas, a work in progress. He has also completed a memoir, Back to the Old Country (vol. 1 of a projected series), which he is hoping to have published soon.

He is a passionate advocate for Holocaust survivors in Eastern Europe. His 1999 op-ed on the poverty of the last survivors was quoted extensively in the Swiss banks settlement. He helped inspire the establishment of the LA based Survivor Mitzvah Project (SMP), and works closely with the Jewish Community of Lithuania (JCL) and the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). He has sought to define and expose the new “Holocaust Obfuscation Movement,” a topic he lectured on this academic year at the University of Pennsylvania, Indiana University, Rutgers, and University College London. He is about halfway through writing a book on the subject. In Yiddish studies, he is at work on the volume Yiddish and Power (Palgrave Macmillan). Dovid divides the year between Vilnius and his home in the mountains of North Wales.

Bio coming soon

Laurynas Katkus was born in 1972 in Vilnius. He has studied Lithuanian and Comparative literature in Vilnius, Leipzig and Berlin. Since the early Nineties he has published widely in Lithuanian literary press, and has two books of poetry on his account – "Balsai, rašteliai" (Voices, Notes, 1998), and "Nardymo pamokos" (Diving lessons, 2003).

At the moment, Katkus is finishing the manuscript for a third poetry book. His poems have been translated into Latvian, Polish, Slovenian, German, English; books of poems in English "October Holidays"(2001) and in German "Tauchstunden" (2003) have appeared. Katkus writes essays and critique and translates from English, German, and Spanish.

In 2006 he defended a PhD thesis on exile in modern poetry at the University of Vilnius. In 2008 he became a fellow of artist academy Akademie Schloß Solitude in Stuttgart. Katkus lives in Vilnius with his wife and three children.

Co-director Kerry Shawn Keys’ roots are in the Appalachian Mountains. He lives in Vilnius,  where he taught translation theory and creative composition as a Fulbright lecturer at Vilnius University. He has dozens of books to his credit, including translations from Portuguese and Lithuanian, and his own poems informed by rural America and Europe, and Brazil and India where he lived for considerable time. His work ranges from theatre-dance pieces to flamenco songs to meditations on the Tao Te Ching, and is often lyrical with intense ontological concerns. Of late, he has been writing prose wonderscripts, and monologues for the stage. A children’s book, The Land of People, received a Lithuanian laureate in 2008 for artwork he co-authored. He often performs with the free jazz percussionist and sound-constellation artist, Vladimir Tarasov – Prior Records released their CD in 2006. His most recent books are Broken Circle (2005), The Burning Mirror (2008) and Book of Beasts (2009). Keys received the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America in 1992, and in 2005 a National Endowment For The Arts Literature Fellowship. He received a Translation Laureate Award from the Lithuanian Writers Union in 2003. He was a Senior Fulbright Research grantee for African-Brazilian studies, and is a member of the Lithuanian Writers Union and PEN. Selected poems have appeared in Czech and Lithuanian.

Julija Šukys (PhD, University of Toronto) is a Montréal writer of literary non-fiction whose work explores the process of writing artistic lives using public and private records. Her 2007 book, Silence is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout, tells the story of the Algerian poet and novelist who was gunned down in an attack attributed to Islamist extremists. She is currently finishing a book-length biography of Ona Šimaitė, a Lithuanian librarian and Holocaust rescuer.

Šukys has been awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and Le Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec. She has held postdoctoral and research fellowships with numerous international foundations, including Yad Vashem’s International Institute for Holocaust Research, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the Holocaust Educational Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada. In 2006 she was in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts, as a member of its Literary Journalism Program.

Her work has appeared in PMLA, Alphabet City, Culture, Theory and Critique, The Journal of Human Rights, Lituanus, Literary Research/Recherche Littéraire and in Yad Vashem’s booklet series, Search and Research. She has published literary translations, including fiction by novelists Ričardas Gavelis and Emanuelis Zingeris, poetry by Tomas Venclova and philosophy by Paul Virilio.

Tomas Venclova was born in 1937 in Klaipeda, Lithuania. After graduating from Vilnius University, he travelled in the Eastern Bloc, where he met and translated Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak. Venclova took part in the Lithuanian and Soviet dissident movements and was one of the five founding members of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group. His activities led to a ban on publishing, exile and the stripping of his Soviet citizenship in 1977. Since 1985 Venclova has taught Slavic languages and literature at Yale University. He has been the recipient of numerous prizes including the Vilenica 1990 International Literary Prize, the Lithuanian National Prize in 2000, the 2002 Prize of Two Nations, which he received jointly with Czeslaw Milosz, the 2005 Jotvingiai Prize, and the New Culture of New Europe Prize, 2005. His works include volumes of poetry, essays, literary biography, conversations and works on Vilnius. His poetry has been translated into English in Winter Dialogue (Northwestern University Press, 1997) and The Junction: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008).

Max Winter's book The Pictures was published by Tarpaulin Sky Press in 2007. He was the winner of the Fifth Annual Boston Review Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in Pleiades, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, The Yale Review, Boulevard, The Iowa Review, Jacket, The Quarterly, Parthenon West, and other publications previously. He was also included on Salon.com in a set of recordings of Paris Review authors, in New Young American Poets (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000) (as you know), and in Under the Rock Umbrella (Mercer University Press, 2007). He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2006.

In addition to reviewing fiction and poetry for Publishers Weekly intermittently for several years, he has published reviews in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Newsday, The Boston Review, Bookforum, The Denver Post, The Boston Book Review, The Boston Phoenix, The San Francisco Chronicle, Bomb, Poets and Writers, and Kirkus Reviews, among other publications.

He is currently a Poetry Editor of Fence and a Senior Editor at a leading educational publisher.