Writer Biographies | Current Festival Schedule

2008 Emerging Fiction Writers Festival

Hannah Tinti grew up in Salem, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including Best American Mystery Stories 2003. Her short story collection, Animal Crackers, has been sold in sixteen countries, and was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway award. A novel, The Good Thief, is forthcoming from the Dial Press on June 24, 2008. She is the editor of One Story magazine.

  Peter Orner was born in Chicago and is the   

  author of the novel The Second Coming of

  Mavala Shikongo (Little, Brown, 2006) and the

  collection Esther Stories (Houghton Mifflin,

  2001). The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo,

  a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller, won the Bard Fiction Prize and is being translated into French, Italian, and German. Esther Stories was awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction, and was a Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Orner has published fiction in Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, McSweeney's, Southern Review, and many other publications. Stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize annual. Orner has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim and Lannan foundations. He is an associate professor at San Francisco State University.

Kelly Link's debut collection, Stranger Things Happen (2001), was a Firecracker nominee, a Village Voice Favorite Book, and a Salon Book of the Year. Stories from the collection have won the Nebula, the James Tiptree Jr., and the World Fantasy Awards. Her second collection, Magic for Beginners, was published in

2005 by Harcourt. A Best of Book Sense 2005 pick, it was also selected for best- of-the-year lists by Time, Salon, Boldtype, Village Voice, San Francisco Chronicle, and The Capitol Times. Kelly has taught or visited at Bard, Columbia, and Smith, among other schools, and she is an editor for the Online Writing Workshop. With Gavin J. Grant she publishes Small Beer press, and with Grant and Ellen Datlow she edits The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror (St. Martin's Press). She is also the editor of an anthology, Trampoline.

  Tom Bissell’s first book, Chasing the Sea

  (Pantheon, 2003), was recently cited by Conde

  Nast Traveler as one of the 86 best travel books

  of all time. His second book, the story collection

  God Lives in St. Petersburg (Pantheon, 2005),

  won the Rome Prize from the American

  Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent book, The Father of All Things (Pantheon, 2007), was selected as one of the best of the year by the Chicago Tribune, Salon, The Christian Science Monitor, and The San Francisco Chronicle, and is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Kiriyama Prize.  He is a contributing editor for Harper's and Virginia Quarterly Review and is currently a fellow at the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Special Guest:

Jodee Stanley has edited at Ploughshares and New England Review, and is currently Editor of Ninth Letter, the award-winning literary magazine published out of the University of Illinois.