Doris Betts is the author of nine books of fiction, including The Gentle Insurrection, The Sharp Teeth of Love, Souls Raised from the Dead, which won the Southern Book Award, and Beasts of the Southern Wild, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Betts taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 35 years. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and holds the medal of merit in the short story from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Joe Gallagher is the Artistic Director of Big Rodent. His first book of epic verse, Night at Suck Mansion, was published in 2010. He was born and raised in Orlando, Florida, and now lives in Brooklyn with his captivating fiancée, Jill.
Thomas Lee is a journalist-artist, filmmaker-photographer based in Hong Kong. He was born in Taipei, schooled in Chicago, and trained in New York. He aspires to make visual narratives that blur the line between documentary and fiction, to distill the abstract and the sublime from real life. His award-winning projects from China, Afghanistan, Uganda, Cuba, Ghana, the Philippines, and the United States have been published worldwide in leading media such as Time, The New York Times, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, The Huffington Post, Asia Weekly, and Modern Weekly, among others.
Bill McAllister is a Chapel Hill native who has been involved in creating and teaching photography for over 30 years. He has taught at the Art Institute of Atlanta, Chowan College and the Art School in Carrboro. Bill was a fellow at the Michael Karolyi Memorial Institute in Vence, France, and is a longtime member of the Society for Photographic Education. He is an member of the Orange County Artists Guild and is represented by FRANK Gallery in downtown Chapel Hill. Bill’s work has been exhibited at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Duke University, Meredith College, Green Hill Art Gallery, The Center for Fine Art Photography, Gallery Mesa AZ, Wedge Gallery NY, Durham Arts Council, and the Horace William House. Publications include American Photographer Magazine, Shots Magazine, and the University of Texas Press. Works are in the permanent collection of GlaxoSmithKline. His website is billmcallisterstudio.com
Wilmer Mills was the Nick Barker Writer-in-Residence at Covenant College before his untimely passing in the summer of 2011. Before that he served for two years as the Kenan Visiting Writer at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His first full-length collection of poems, Light for the Orphans, was published by Story Line Press in 2002. He has published poems in The New Republic, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, Poetry, The New Criterion, Shenandoan, Literary Imagination, and others. His poems have been anthologized in Penguin/Longman Anthology of Contemporary American Poets (2004), The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (2009), and are forthcoming in an anthology from Anvil Poetry Press in the UK of six American poets.
Valerie Sayers is the author of six novels, including Brain Fever and The Powers, forthcoming, and Professor of English at Notre Dame. Her literary honors include an NEA, a Pushcart Prize, and “Notable” and “Distinguished” citations from the New York Times, Best American Short Stories, and Best American Essays.
Zachary Vernon is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he also teaches American Literature and First-Year Composition. Vernon studies 20th and 21st century American Literature, and he is currently working on a a dissertation that explores issues of ecocriticism and ecoterrorism in 1960s and 70s American literature and cinema.
Graham Webster is a Ph.D student in political science at University of Washington, where he studies China, technology, and politics. Formerly a journalist based in Beijing, he writes on Asian politics, technology and the environment for a variety of publications and works as an independent online communications consultant. He holds a master’s degree in East Asian studies from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree in journalism and international studies from Northwestern University. His website is gwbstr.com.
Erik Wennermark writes prose in Chicago (sometimes while listening to Leonard Cohen). Check out more of his work at erikwennermark.com.
Kevin Wilson is the author of the collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009), which received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award. His novel, The Family Fang, is forthcoming in the summer of 2011 from Ecco. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee.