Sara Marcus, a writer and musician, is the author of Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, a critically acclaimed account of that feminist and musical movement. She has also written for Bookforum, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate, Salon, and Heeb magazine, where she was politics editor for five years. She lives in Brooklyn.

Co-sponsored with Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Charles Bernstein is the author of All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2010), Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays & Inventions (Chicago 2011), Blind Witness: Three American Operas (Factory School 2008), Girly Man (Chicago 2006), and My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago 1999). He is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where he co-directs PennSound.

Jim Shepard is the author of six novels and four collections of short stories. His novel Project X won the 2005 Library of Congress/Massachusetts Book Award, and his 2010 collection, Like You'd Understand, Anyway, was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has been a columnist on film for The Believer and is the recipient of a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches at Williams College.

Dinaw Mengestu's debut novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, earned him comparisons to Bellow, Fitzgerald, and Naipaul, and garnered ecstatic critical acclaim for its haunting depiction of the immigrant experience in America. He was selected as a winner of the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" Award, the 2008 Lannan Literary Fellowship, The Guardian First Book Award in the U.K., and France's Prix du Premier Roman Etranger. His second novel, How to Read the Air, was published this fall and has earned him further critical praise. In June 2010, Mengestu was given a highly coveted spot on The New Yorker's "20 under 40" Writers to Watch list.

Yusef Komunyakaa's numerous books of poems include Talking Dirty to the Gods, Thieves of Paradise, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Magic City, Dien Cai Dau, which won The Dark Room Poetry Prize, and I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head, winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Award. In 1999, he was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Yusef Komunyakaa is the Senior Distinguished Poet in the Graduate Writing Program at NYU.

Linda Schlossberg received her PhD in English literature from Harvard University, where she is the Assistant Director of the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies program. In her debut novel, Life in Miniature, published by Kensington in December 2010, Schlossberg emerges as a powerful new literary voice with this wholly original coming-of-age story. Life in Miniature reveals the compelling drama that unfolds as the delicate bond between mother and daughter begins to fray.

Wayne Koestenbaum is recognized as an important American poet, as one of the founders of queer studies, and as a wide-ranging cultural critic who crosses boundaries of literature, art, music, and popular culture. His book The Queen′s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, published in 1993, had a significant impact on the emerging fields of gender and sexuality studies, as have his groundbreaking essays in influential anthologies.

Amy Bloom is the author of two novels and two collections of short stories, and she has been a nominee for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and numerous anthologies here and abroad. She has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and the Atlantic, among many other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award. Her new collection of short stories, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, was published in 2010. She has taught at Yale University for the last decade. She is currently Wesleyan University’s Kim-Frank Family Writer In Residence.

Poetry: March 01, 2011

James Kaplan has been writing about people and ideas in business and popular culture, and also writing fiction, for over three decades. His essays and reviews, as well as more than a hundred major profiles of figures ranging from Madonna to Helen Gurley Brown, Calvin Klein to John Updike, Miles Davis to Meryl Streep, and Arthur Miller to Larry David, have appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and Esquire. In November 2010, Doubleday published Frank: The Voice, the first volume of Kaplan's biography of Frank Sinatra.