Nicholas Montemarano is the author of the short story collection If the Sky Falls (2005) and the novel A Fine Place (2002). His short stories have been published in Esquire, Zoetrope: All-Story, Tin House, DoubleTake, Gettysburg Review, Antioch Review, Agni, Pushcart Prize XXVII, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Novelist Jill McCorkle selected his story “Once Removed” as the winner of the 2006 Eudora Welty Prize in Fiction.

Steven Schwartz is the author of two short story collections, To Leningrad in Winter (1985) and Lives of the Fathers (1991), and two novels, Therapy (1994) and A Good Doctor’s Son (1998). His stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, North American Review, and Crazyhorse, among other journals. He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, the 1999 Colorado Book Award for Fiction, and two O. Henry awards. He teaches creative writing at Colorado State University. Scholar Mark Winchell chose Schwartz’ essay “Tabula Rasa” for the 2006 Cleanth Brooks Prize in Nonfiction.

Jane Springer is currently a doctoral candidate in Florida State University’s Creative Writing program. Her first book, Dear Blackbird (2007), was recently chosen by J. D. McClatchy as the 2006 recipient of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize for Poetry, from the University of Utah Press. Her poems have most recently appeared or are forthcoming in the Chattahoochee Review, Cincinnati Review, lyric, The Southern Review, Heliotrope, Margie, 32Poems, and New Letters. She will be a featured emerging writer at the CLMP’s “Periodically Speaking” event April 10 at the New York Public Library in Manhattan. Springer was awarded the 2006 Robert Penn Warren prize in Poetry for her poems “Quilts” and “Lamentations,” selected by Cleopatra Mathis.