About Larry Dark
Larry Dark lives in Montclair, New Jersey.
Dave Eggers is the editor of
McSweeney’s and author of
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. He lives in northern California.
Joyce Carol Oates is the author of several books, including novels, short story collections, drama, and nonfiction. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Colson Whitehead’s most recent novel is
John Henry Days. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
About Dave Eggers
Photo © Michelle Quint
Dave Eggers is the author of six previous books, including
Zeitoun, winner of the American Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
What Is the What was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award and won France’s
Prix Medici. That book, about Valentino Achak Deng, a survivor of the civil war in Sudan, gave birth to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, which operates a secondary school in South Sudan run by Mr. Deng. Eggers is the founder and editor of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing house based in San Francisco that produces a quarterly journal, a monthly magazine,
The Believer, and an oral history series, Voice of Witness. In 2002, with Nínive Calegari he co-founded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for youth in the Mission District of San Francisco. Local communities have since opened sister 826 centers in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Ann Arbor, Seattle, Boston and Washington, DC, and similar centers now exist in London (the Ministry of Stories), Dublin (Fighting Words) and in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Melbourne, and many other cities. A native of Chicago, Eggers now lives in Northern California with his wife and two children.
About Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers
We Were the Mulvaneys and
Blonde (a finalist for the National Book Award), and the
New York Times bestsellers
The Falls (winner of the 2005 Prix Femina) and The
Gravedigger's Daughter.
About Colson Whitehead
Photo © © Erin Patrice O'Brien
Colson Whitehead is the author of the novels
The Intuitionist,
John Henry Days,
Apex Hides the Hurt, and
Sag Harbor. He has also written a book of about his hometown, a collection of essays called
The Colossus of New York. His work has appeared in the
New York Times,
Granta,
Harper’s, and the
New Yorker. A recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, a MacArthur grant, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, he lives in New York City.