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George came into national prominence in 2002 when then U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins chose his collection of poems, The Good Kiss, to win the University of Akron Poetry Prize. Collins then named George one of two Witter Bynner Fellows for 2002 and invited him to read at the Library of Congress. In 2006 Ed Field chose his book, Haywire, to win the prestigious May Swenson Poetry Award, and radio host Garrison Keillor began reading George’s poems on his daily National Public Radio broadcast, The Writer’s Almanac. The popularity of George’s poems on the show led to an appearance on Keillor’s long-running NPR radio show, A Prairie Home Companion.

George’s many honors include the 2022 Readers’ Choice Award from Rattle Magazine and the 2021 Editor’s Choice Award from New Ohio Review. He has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, the Pushcart Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress. He has won the May Swenson Poetry Award, the Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize, the Devins Award, the University of Akron Poetry Prize, the Cleveland Arts Prize, and the 2023 Rattle Chapbook Prize.

His poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Best American Poetry, New Ohio Review, Field, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Sewanee Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, and elsewhere.

George is Distinguished Professor of English at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he lives with his lovely wife and two fine little boys.

(From )

"Hala Alyan is a lyrical force, a much-needed Arab American voice." —Etaf Rum, New York Times best-selling author of A Woman Is No Man

Hala Alyan is a licensed clinical psychologist, professor at New York University, and writer. Her work grapples heroically with themes of family, displacement, belonging, and what ‘home’ means. Of her work, author Fatimah Asghar writes, "I feel honored to be alive in a time where I can read Hala Alyan." Hala was born in Carbondale, Illinois, and grew up in Kuwait, Oklahoma, Texas, Maine, and Lebanon. She earned a BA from the American University of Beirut and an MA from Columbia University. While completing her doctorate in clinical psychology from Rutgers University, she specialized in trauma and addiction work with various populations.

She is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize – of which Ru Freeman praises, "Hala Alyan shows how we carry our origins in our hearts wherever we may roam, and how that history is calibrated by the places we choose to put down roots. This is a book with the power to both break and mend your heart." Her latest novel, The Arsonists’ City, was a finalist for the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, LitHub, The New York Times Book Review and elsewhere. Hala’s forthcoming poetry collection, The Moon That Turns You Back, will be published by Ecco this spring.

She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

(From The Tuesday Agency)

Jeff VanderMeer's NYT-bestselling Southern Reach trilogy has been translated into over 37 languages. The first novel, Annihilation, won the Nebula Award and Shirley Jackson Award, and was made into a movie by Paramount in 2018. Recent works include Hummingbird Salamander, Bliss, and A Peculiar Peril, in addition to Theo Ellsworth's graphic novel adaptation of his short story Secret Life. Dead Astronauts, Borne (a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award), The Strange Bird, set in the Borne universe, are being developed for TV by AMC and continue to explore themes related to the environment, animals, and our future.

Over a 35-year career, VanderMeer has been a four-time World Fantasy Award winner and 20-time nominee. For eleven years, VanderMeer served as the co-director of Shared Worlds, a unique teen SF/fantasy writing camp he helped found, located at Wofford College in South Carolina.

Called "the weird Thoreau" by The New Yorker, VanderMeer has lived in Florida since he was in middle school, attending the University of Florida in Gainesville before moving to Tallahassee in 1992. He frequently speaks about issues related to Florida, climate change, and storytelling, including at Vanderbilt, DePaul, MIT, the Key West Literary Seminar, Yale, and the Guggenheim. He has taught at the Yale Writers’ Conference and the Miami International Book Fair, among many others, and was the 2016-2017 Trias Writer-in-Residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in upstate New York. He is the recipient of an NEA-funded Florida Individual Artist Fellowship for excellence in fiction and a Florida Artist Enhancement Grant. Nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Nation, Esquire, TIME, Current Affairs, Vulture, and the Los Angeles Times. He was a 2019 National Book Award judge for fiction and previously served as a judge for the Eisner Awards, the World Fantasy Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award, among others.

Previous novels include Veniss Underground and the Ambergris Cycle (City of Saints & Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword, and Finch), reissued from MCD/FSG, with nonfiction titles including Wonderbook, the world’s first fully illustrated writing guide, and Booklife, the first career guide to fully integrate the internet into tactics and strategy. His short story collections include The Third Bear, the title story from which is under option for development into film.

VanderMeer grew up in the Fiji Islands and spent six months traveling through Asia, Africa, and Europe before returning to the United States. These travels have deeply influenced his fiction, which he started writing at age eight, publishing his first short story at age 14. Early on, he wrote and published poetry and short fiction extensively, in addition to running a publishing house, the Ministry of Whimsy, and holding literary events featuring National Book Award winners like Richard Wilbur and other major poets at the Thomasville Center in Gainesville, Florida. The Ministry became the first small press to have a book win the Philip K. Dick Award. (Stepan Chapman’s The Troika) and he edited the award-winning Leviathan series, which published writers such as Rikki Ducornet, Brian Evenson, and Michael Moorcock.

VanderMeer also co-edited (with wife Ann VanderMeer) ground-breaking anthologies such as Best American Fantasy 1 and 2, Steampunk 1 and 2, New Weird, The Weird, The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, The Time Traveler’s Almanac, The Big Book of Science Fiction, The Big Book of Classic Fantasy, and The Big Book of Modern Fantasy.

For several years, the VanderMeers also ran Cheeky Frawg, a small press that published Amos Tutuola and many works in translation, including Swedish writer Karin Tidbeck’s first collection in English and Finnish icon Leena Krohn’s complete stories in one mammoth volume. The VanderMeers rewilded yard in Tallahassee has been featured in national and international media, including in an Arte TV documentary in Europe and an Audubon Magazine profile.

(From , photo credit Ditte Valente)