Featured Readers
Aimee Bender is the author of three books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998), which was a New York Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000), which was an L.A. Times pick of the year, and Willful Creatures (2005), which was nominated by the Believer as one of the best books of the year. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper's, Tin House, McSweeney's, the Paris Review, and many more, and it was heard on PRI's This American Life and Selected Shorts. She has received two Pushcart prizes and was nominated for the James R. Tiptree Award in 2005. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches creative writing at USC. Photo: D. Bender 
Colin Channer's major works of fiction include the best-selling novel Waiting in Vain, a Washington Post Critic's Choice, and his story collection, Passing Through. He also edited the groundbreaking anthology Iron Balloons: Hit Fiction from Jamaica's Calabash Writers Workshop (Akashic, 2006). His most recent novella, The Girl with the Golden Shoes (Akashic, 2007) includes an afterword by Russell Banks, and was a Washington Post Spring Pick. A naturalized American of Jamaican origin, he is an assistant professor of English and the coordinator of the BA creative writing program at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn. He is also the Founder and Artistic Director of the Calabash International Literary Festival, which the Associated Press describes as "one of the most vibrant literary festivals to come along in a long time." He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Channer joins the Columbia College Chicago Fiction Writing Department for the spring 2008 semester, as Visiting Artist in Residence. Photo: Joan Chan 
Junot Diaz is the first Dominican-born man to become a major writer in the United States. His first short story collection, Drown, became an overnight literary sensation. Diaz moved to the United States with his parents at age six, settling in New Jersey. He was selected by New Yorker magazine as one of the top 20 writers for the 21st century. His first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a portion of which was excerpted as a short story in the New Yorker, was released in September 2007. It was named #1 on Time Magazine's list of Best Fiction for 2007, and it also recently captured the National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has also appeared in Story, the Paris Review, and in the anthologies Best American Short Stories and African Voices. Diaz completed his undergraduate studies at Rutgers University, and he earned his MFA from Cornell University. He is currently a creative writing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Photo: Nancy Crampton
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is the author of the bestselling novels Queen of Dreams, Mistress of Spices, Sister of My Heart, The Vine of Desire, and The Conch Bearer (for children), as well as the prizewinning collections Arranged Marriage and The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (stories), and Black Candle and Leaving Yuba City (poems). In February, she released her new, critically acclaimed novel, The Palace of Illusions. Her writing has won an American Book Award, two Pushcart Prizes, two PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards, a C.Y. Lee Creative Writing Award, an Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize, and a Distinguished Achievement Award from the South Asian Literary Association. Divakaruni’s work has been translated into 20 languages and included in over 70 anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, The O’Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. She lives in Houston, Texas, and teaches at the University of Houston, where she is the Betty and Gene McDavid Professor of Creative Writing. Photo: Anand Divakaruni 
Cristina García is the author of four highly acclaimed novels: Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, and the recently published A Handbook to Luck. She has edited two anthologies, Cubanísimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature and Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature. Two works for young readers, I Wanna Be Your Shoebox and The Dog Who Loved the Moon, will be published in 2008. García's work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into 14 languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, A Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA grant, among others.
Photo: Norma I. Quintana
ZZ Packer graduated from Yale University, and she received master's degrees from Johns Hopkins and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. Her collection of short stories, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Canongate/Riverhead Books), was a New York Times Notable Book, winner of a Commonwealth Club Fiction Award and an Alex Award and a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist. She was recently named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists in 2007. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, and Zoetrope, while her nonfiction has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, and Salon. She has received a Whiting Writers' Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two sons. "Buffalo Soldiers," her story that was published in Granta, is from her novel in progress, The Thousands. Photo: ZZ Packer
More Featured Readers
Don De Grazia is a full-time fiction writing professor at Columbia College, where he also earned his BA and MFA. After completing his master's thesis, American Skin, De Grazia decided to send it off to London's prestigious publisher, Jonathan Cape, who had worked with Irvine Welsh and the Scottish Beats he so admired. Cape offered him a contract, and in January 1998, American Skin was published in the U.K. Hailed as an American classic, the book was so highly acclaimed by critics that it caught the attention of publishers around the world, and in April 2000, American Skin was released in the U.S. by Scribner. A flood of positive reviews appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and the San Francisco Examiner. It is now in its fourth printing and was recently anthologized in The Outlaw Bible of American Fiction. A member of the Screenwriters Guild of America, De Grazia is currently adapting the script for American Skin. He resides in Chicago, where he is at work on his second novel. Photo: kate paris 
Gina Frangello's highly acclaimed first novel, My Sister's Continent (Chiasmus), was named one of the best books of 2006 by Las Vegas City Life and was a "Read This!" finalist on the Litblog Co-Op in spring 2006. Her short fiction has been published in many literary journals including Swink, StoryQuarterly, Clackamas Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, and Blithe House Quarterly. She guest-edited the anthology Falling Backwards: Stories of Fathers and Daughters, and has been a freelance journalist for the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Reader. She is the co-founder and Executive Editor of OV Books, an independent book press that grew out of the longtime literary magazine Other Voices and is dedicated to publishing short story collections and anthologies. Her second novel, London Calling, will be published in fall 2008 by Impetus Press.
Photo: Jessica Tierney 
Lila S. Jokanovic's work has appeared in Hair Trigger, Kavithalaya, Gravity Magazine, and Chicago's National Public Radio station WBEZ, and most recently, at DesiLit's annual Kriti Literary Festival. She has won a number of awards for her writing, including two Ragdale Fellowships to work on her novel Red Hibiscus, and a Pushcart nomination for an excerpt from American Raaga (published in F Magazine). She teaches Fiction Writing at Columbia College Chicago and has acted as Assistant Director of Story Week Festival of Writers. Photo: I. Jokanovic 
Devon Polderman is academic manager for the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago. Previously, he served as Executive Director of the Schultz Group, Inc. and the Story Workshop Institute. Devon has presented at national conferences for the Associated Writing Programs, National Council of Teachers of English, the Midwest Modern Language Association, and others. He is currently completing a long novel, Famous Kalamazoo Bullshit Stories, and his fiction has been published in F Magazine, Hair Trigger, Bluelit, AWP Pedagogy Papers, and other places.
Photo: Jessica Tierney 
Alexis J. Pride is a fiction writer from Chicago. She is a full-time professor of creative writing at Columbia College Chicago, where she also serves as program coordinator for the Fiction Writing Department's extensive Outreach Programs. Pride earned her PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is a novelist, playwright, producer, and founder of The AJ Ensemble Theatre Company. Her most recent credits include her novel, Where the River Ends. Excerpts from this work were published in editions of f5 and f6, and Ink Stains. She is a contributing writer to Chicago InnerView Magazine, has served as editor for the internationally circulated literary anthologies PragueMalion and Belletrist, and is presently working toward the completion of her second novel, Game Keepers. Photo: Jessica Tierney
Betty Shiflett is professor emerita of the Columbia College Chicago Fiction Writing Department and a winner of the Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship Award. She was the founding director of the Fiction Writing Department's Story Workshop Tutoring and Tutor Training program, Artistic Director of the Visiting Writers program, and a founding director of the department's in-service teacher training program. She is also a distinguished writer, playwright, and writing consultant. Shiflett is author of the play We Dream of Tours and the musical drama Phantom Rider. Her stories, articles, novel and play excerpts have appeared in Life Magazine, Evergreen Review, Fiction and Poetry by Texas Women, Emergence: Writings by Women, Private Arts, F Magazine, The Story Workshop Reader, College English, Writing From Start to Finish, and many others. Her award-winning story "The Country Barber" was published in American Fiction and translated into Mandarin by the novelist Geling Yan for Sichuan Literature Monthly. She is co-producer and interviewer for the Story Workshop video The Living Voice Moves, featuring Randy Albers and his Prose Forms class, and she and her Story Workshop Advanced Fiction class are featured in the video Story from First Impulse to Final Draft, co-produced by John Schultz and Randy Albers. Shiflett has been a featured writer three times in the Southwest Writers Conference at Angelo State University, San Angelo, Texas and she was recently a visiting professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. She is Principal Story Workshop Master Teacher, now at work on a memoir as novel, Grassfires.
Photo: Tony Ortega