Reagan Arthur grew up in Los Angeles and moved to New York in 1989. She worked at St. Martin's Press and was a founding editor of Picador USA before joining Little, Brown as a Senior Editor in 2001. Authors with whom she has worked include Kate Atkinson, Rachel Cusk, Tim Gautreaux, Oscar Casares, Joanna Scott, Judy Budnitz, Elizabeth Crane, Ian Rankin, George Pelecanos, Lisa Selin Davis, Elizabeth Kostova, and Caitlin Flanagan. [top]

Sally Ball is the author of Annus Mirabilis, which received the Barrow Street Press Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in Boulevard, Ploughshares, Slate, Threepenny Review, and The Best American Poetryanthology, and her prose in Pleiades and the Review of Contemporary Fiction. She is the senior editor of Four Way Books. [top]

Daniel Bosch is Director of the Writing Studio at Walnut Hill, a school for young artists in Natick, Massachussetts.  His poems, translations, and reviews have appeared in journals such as The New Republic, Agni, and Harvard Review.  His poems based on works by Osip Mandelstam—and referring to Tom Hanks' films—won the 1998 Boston Review Poetry Prize, and his book Crucible was published by Handsel Books in 2002.  His new essay reconsidering Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet has just appeared at Contemporary Poetry Review. [top]

Jay Boyer teaches in the Creative Writing program at ASU. In addition to several books of non-fiction and shorter work published in a wide variety of periodicals, his plays have been produced in Europe and Canada, as well as across the United States. In 1995, he was selected by the Carnegie Foundation as Arizona's Professor of the Year. [top]

Ron Carlson is the author of eight books of fiction, most recently his selected stories A Kind of Flying, the novel The Speed of Light, and the story collection At the Jim Bridger. His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Harper's, The New Yorker, Gentlemen's Quarterly, Epoch, The North American Review, and other journals, as well as The Best American Short Stories, The O'Henry Prize Series, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and dozens of other anthologies. He is Foundation Professor and Regents' Professor of English at Arizona State University. Among his awards are a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, the Cohen Prize at Ploughshares, and a National Society of Arts and Letters Literature Award.

Click here for appearances by Ron Carlson
at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference [top]

Jennifer Chapis, Nightboat Books cofounder and Editor, has published poems and received honors from many literary journals, recently including: Quarterly West, Florida Review, McSweeney's, and Spoon River Poetry Review. Her awards include first place in the GSU Review's 2005 Annual Poetry Contest and the Florida Review's 2005 Editor's Prize. Her book-length manuscript, one wing apart, has been a recent finalist in several poetry contests, including a Benjamin Saltman Award honorable mention with Red Hen Press. She received her training in poetry from the Graduate Creative Writing Programs at New York University and Arizona State University, where she was the Poetry Editor and Art Editor of Washington Square and Hayden's Ferry Review. Jennifer lives in California, where she operates the Website Management firm WebAha! with her husband, the fiction writer Josh Goldfaden. [top]

Paul Cook is the author of eight novels, the latest of which is called Life Among the Parallels. He teaches courses in English and American literature, including science fiction at Arizona State University. [top]

Bernard Cooper has written two collections of memoirs as well as a novel, A Year of Rhymes, and a collection of short stories, Guess Again. Most recently, he is the author of Bill From My Father: A Memoir. He is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award, an O. Henry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at Antioch/Los Angeles and at the UCLA Writer's Program, and is currently the art critic for Los Angeles Magazine.

Click here for appearances by Bernard Cooper
at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference [top]

Gerald Costanzo has published seven collections of poetry. His new book, Regular Haunts: New and Selected Poems, is forthcoming, as is Spiderman for Life: The Collected Poems of James W. Hall, which he edited. He was the editor of Three Rivers Poetry Journal for twenty years, and founded Carnegie Mellon Press in 1975. He has been honored with two Pushcart Prizes, as well as Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Falk Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines. He currently teaches at Carnegie Mellon. [top]

Jen Currin's first book, The Sleep of Four Cities, was published by Anvil Press in 2005. Her second book, Hagiography, won the 2005 Winnow Press Open Book Award, and will be published in early 2007. She lives in Vancouver, B.C., where she teaches for the Vancouver Film School and Langara College. She is a member of vertigo west, a Vancouver-based poetry collective. [top]

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is the author of four award-winning books of poetry, the latest being Leaving Yuba City. Her work has been included in over thirty anthologies, including Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her fiction includes The Sister of My Heart, The Unknown Error of Our Lives, Vine of Desire, and Queen of Dreams. Her first book of short stories, Arranged Marriage, won the 1996 American Book Award, and her novel, The Mistress of Spices was chosen as one of the best 100 books of the 20th Century by the San Francisco Chronicle. She is the author of two young adult novels—Neela: Victory Song and The Conch Bearer, which was chosen as one of the best books of 2003 and has been nominated for the 2005 Bluebonnet and the Rebecca Caudill Award. She is a Professor at the University of Houston.

Chitra Banerjee Divankaruni will not be participating in the 2006 ASU Writers Conference due to a family emergency.

Click here for appearances by Chitra Divakaruni
at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference [top]

Carolyn Forché is an award-winning poet who has published four books of poetry, including Gathering the Tribes, The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, and most recently, Blue Hour, which was published in Spring 2003. She has published several books of translations, and her articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Esquire, and others. Her awards include the 1998 Edith and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and three NEA Fellowships. She teaches at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, and lives in Maryland with her husband and son.

Click here for appearances by Carolyn Forché
at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference [top]

Forest Gander is the author of numerous books of poetry, the most recent of which are Eye Against Eye, Poems from New Directions, and A Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory, & Transcendence, Essays from Shoemaker & Hoard.  His translations include No Shelter: Selected Poems of Pura Lopez Colome and, with Kent Johnson, Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz and The Night (forthcoming from Princeton U Press in Spring 2006). Gander is a Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature at Brown University.

Click here for appearances by Forrest Gander
at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference [top]

Lee Gutkind is founder and editor of the popular journal, Creative Nonfiction, the first and largest literary journal to publish nonfiction exclusively.  His new memoir, Forever Fat: Essays by the Godfather, was partially inspired by a Vanity Fair article pinpointing Gutkind as the "godfather behind creative nonfiction." Gutkind is a former director of the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh where he is currently a Professor of English.

Click here for appearances by Lee Gutkind
at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference [top]

Julie Hampton is recipient of an MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University in May 2005 where she performd "Hung," a perormance piece she developed with a dancer around a series of poems she wrote. Her work has been published in Indiana Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, and Spork. From 1995–2001, she directed the Valley of the Sun YMCA Writer's Voice where she organized author readings, community writing workshops, and special literary programs for kids and adults. She has taught creative writing at Metro Arts High School and is currenbtly coordinating the ASU Young Writers Program partnership with Tolleson Union High School where she is a writer-in-residence. She is also owner and curator of a. ware, an art studio and store dedicated to the experimental installation and integration of fine art, furnishings and fashion. [top]

Robert Hass is a former poet laureate. He has published many books of poetry including Praise, Human Wishes , and Sun Under Wood, as well as a book of essays on poetry, Twentieth Century Pleasures. In addition to his work in poetry and translation, he is the founder of River of Words (ROW), an organization that promotes environmental and arts education in affiliation with the Library of Congress Center for the Book. He was chosen as Educator of the year by the North American Association on Environmental Education, and he was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2005. His awards include the Macarthur "Genius" Fellowship, the National Book Critics' Circle award, and the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. He is a professor of English at UC Berkeley.

Click here for appearances by Robert Hass
at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference [top]

Jeanne Heuving's book Incapacity just won a Book of the Year Award from Small Press Traffic in San Francisco.  Listed as poetry, fiction, autobiography and biography, Incapacity performs an act of negativity, clearing and naming its space, its difficulty.  Her second creative book, Divided Lights, pays homage to the poetics of H.D. and Ezra Pound and is forthcoming from Chax.  She is the author of multiple critical essays and articles on innovative and avant garde texts, including the book Omissions Are Not Accidents:  Gender in the Art of Marianne Moore. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright Foundation, Simpson Center for the Humanities, and the Beinecke Library.  She is on the editorial advisory board of HOW2 and a member of the Subtext Collective in Seattle.  She is an associate professor at the University of Washington, Bothell and on the graduate faculty in English at the University of Washington, Seattle. [top]

Elizabyth Hiscox is co-editor of poetry for Hayden's Ferry Review. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Watershed and Gulf Coast. She has taught creative writing at California State University, Chico and is currently an MFA candidate at Arizona State University where she has won awards for her work, including two Sonoran Prizes in Poetry. [top]

Cynthia Hogue, Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Poetry at ASU and has published three collections and two chapbooks of poetry, most recently Flux. Her fourth collection, The Incognito Body, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2005. Her work has been nominated for five Pushcart awards, and received the Mammoth Press Poetry Prize and The Judith Pearson Siegel Award for poetry. Her critical books and essays on women's poetry include the co-edited We Who 'Love To Be Astonished': Experimental Feminist Poetics and Performance Art. For her work, Hogue has been awarded NEA, NEH (Summer Seminar), and Fulbright fellowships. She is currently Interim Director for the ASU Creative Writing Program and the 2004-2005 H.D. Fellow at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. [top]

Charles Jensen is the author of the chapbook, Little Burning Edens. His poetry has appeared in Quarterly West, West Branch, Bloom, and Colorado Review. With Sarah Vap, he has interviewed C. D. Wright, Lynn Emanuel, and Frank Paino. He works as the Community & Adult Enrichment Coordinator at the Piper Center for Creative Writing. [top]

Hershman John is both a poet and a short fiction writer. He is Navajo—born for the Deer Spring People and the Bitter Water People.  He enjoys reading American Indian authors, poetic theory, and comic books. A full time faculty member at Phoenix College, he teaches composition, poetry, American Indian Studies, including an exciting course in Comic Book Writing. Some of his publications include: Flyway-A Literary Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Journal of Navajo Education, O Taste and See: Food Poems, Family Matters; Poems of Our Families… [top]

Tania Katan is an essayist, playwright, and performer. Her plays have been seen at Connecticut Repertory Theatre, Circle Repertory Theatre, Theatre Rhinoceros, and others throughout the United States. She performs her essays regularly on Comedy Central's Sit-n-Spin and Word-A-Rama. Her awards include the American College Theatre Festival Award in Playwriting, the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award, and ACT's David Mamet Playwriting Award. Her memoir, My One-Night Stand With Cancer, is the 2006 ALA Stonewall Book Award Honoree in Non Fiction.

Click here for appearances by Tania Katan
at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference [top]

Robert Kroetsch was born in 1927 in Heisler, Alberta. He attended the University of Alberta and then the U of Iowa. After a stint working on the river boats in the Yukon and the Northwest Territories, he eventually taught at S.U.N.Y. Binghamton. Kroetsch then taught writing and literature at the University of Calgary and the University of Manitoba. He now lives in Winnipeg. The author of over thirty books, Kroetsch is internationally known as a poet and novelist. He is also widely acknowledged in Canada for his literary criticism and theory. Kroetsch won the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction with his novel The Studhorse Man. [top]

Marylee MacDonald has published fiction and creative nonfiction in StoryQuarterly, The Bellevue Literary Review, Raven Chronicles, River Oak Review, and Four Quarters, among others. She has received two Illinois Arts Council awards for short stories, one a fellowship, another a finalist's award, and a creative nonfiction essay won honorable mention in the Isak Dinesen Creative Nonfiction contest. Ms. MacDonald received her B.A. in English from Stanford University and her M.A. in Creative Writing/English from San Francisco State. She edited River Oak Review for three years, and most recently, served as guest editor for the 2004 issue of StoryQuarterly. [top]

Alistair Macleod is the author of two collections of short stories: As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and The Lost Salt Gift of Blood. His novel, No Great Mischief was published to great critical acclaim and has been awarded the Trillium Award, the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, the Dartmouth Book & Writing Award for Fiction, the Atlantic Provinces Booksellers Choice Award, the 2001 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. All of his published short stories, plus one new piece, were collected in Island, published in 2000. He teaches creative writing at the University of Windsor, Ontario, and has taught in the writing program at the Banff School of Fine Arts for seven years.

Click here for appearances by Alistair MacLeod
at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference [top]

Kevin McIlvoy teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at New Mexico State University, where he edits the national literary magazine Puerto del Sol. He has received the New Mexico Governor's Excellence in the Arts Award, he has been awarded several teaching prizes, his novels have been nominated for national awards, and he has been a volunteer instructor of creative writing at the Munson Senior Center in Las Cruces for twenty-two years. His most recent novel, The Complete History of New Mexico was published this year by Graywolf Press. [top]

T. M. McNally is the author of five works of fiction: Low Flying Aircraft, Until Your Heart Stops, Almost Home, Quick, and The Goat Bridge, portions of which received the Faulkner-Wisdom Gold Medal for the Novella. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Howard Foundation at Brown University, he teaches at Arizona State University and lives in Scottsdale with Sally Ball and their three children. [top]

Kelly McWilliams loves music, studies Aikido, plays jazz and classical piano, and published her first book, Doormat, at the age of fifteen. She lives in Arizona, where she shares a room with her semi-tame cat, Griffin. [top]

Paul Morris directs the new Master of Liberal Studies Program at ASU, which offers a concentration in Nature, Science and Creative Nonfiction writing. His poetry, essays, and translations have appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, Translation, Threepenny Review, among others. [top]

G. Lynn Nelson, PhD, is a professor in the English Department at Arizona State University.  He is Director of the Greater Phoenix Area Writing Project, a part of the National Writing Project.  In addition to his book Writing and Being: Taking Back Our Lives Through The Power of Language, Nelson has written many articles, including "Warriors With Words: Toward a Post-Columbine Writing Curriculum." [top]

Sean Nevin teaches creative writing for Arizona State University at the West campus. He is Assistant Director of ASU's Young Writer's Program and is co-editor of 22 Across: An Anthology of Young Writers. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including: The Gettysburg Review, Poet Lore, 5AM, JAMA, and Runes: A Review of Poetry. Awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize, a poetry fellowship from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and a nomination for the Pushcart Prize. His chapbook, A House That Falls, won the 2005 Slapering Hol Press Prize and will be published later this year.

W. H. New is a critically acclaimed author of six books of poetry: Science Lessons, Raucous, Stone/Rain, Riverbook & Ocean, Night Room,and, most recently, the book-length poem Underwood Log. He is also the author of three children’s books, Vanilla Gorilla, Llamas in the Laundry, and Dream Helmet, as well as his Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. He has written several hundred articles, reviews, and monographs, and he is the editor of over a dozen widely used anthologies.  In 1986, he was elected to the Royal Society of Canada. He retired in 2003 as University Killam Professor at the University of British Columbia. Currently he is writing a series of essays on Australian fiction.
[top]

Laurie Notaro began her career writing for Arizona State University's newspaper, the State Press, while she attended the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, and eventually became a columnist for The Arizona Republic. She is the author of five books, including The New York Times bestseller, The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club, and is currently at work on her sixth.

Click here for appearances by Laurie Notaro
at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference [top]

Stephen Pyne is a Regents professor at Arizona State University, and the author of seventeen books, most of which deal with environmental history, especially fire.  Among award-winners are The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica; Fire in America; Year of the Fires; and How the Canyon Became Grand.  The Los Angeles Times has awarded him its Robert Kirsch Prize for body-of-work contribution to American letters.  [top]

Guillermo Reyes is the author of various plays, including the off-Broadway hits, Men on the Verge of a His-Panic Breakdown and Mother Lolita. His most recent plays, The Suspects premiered at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in April 2005, and Sunrise at Monticello at Playwrights Theater of New Jersey. Other plays include Deporting the Divas, Chilean Holiday, The Hispanick Zone, The Seductions of Johnny Diego, A Southern Christmas, Miss Consuelo, and others. He is currently Head of the Playwriting Program at Arizona State University, and a member of the Dramatists Guild. [top]

Jewell Parker Rhodes is the Virginia G. Piper Chair in Creative Writing and Artistic Director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. She is the author of the novels Voodoo Dreams, Magic City, and most recently, the historical novel Douglass' Women, which was awarded the 2003 American Book Award, 2003 Black Caucus of the American Library Association Award for Literary Excellence, the 2003 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA award in Fiction and for the Hurston-Wright Legacy award. She has received a Yaddo Creative Writing Fellowship and the National Endowment of the Arts Award in Fiction. Her newest book, Voodoo Season, is due out in August from Atria Books.

Click here for appearances by Jewell Parker Rhodes
at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference [top]

Sharman Apt Russell is the author of five books, and her essays have been widely published in magazines, journals, and anthologies. Her most recent book of creative non-fiction is Hunger: An Unnatural History, and her previous book An Obsession with Butterflies: Our Long Love Affair with a Singular Insect was a pick of independent booksellers in their Summer 2003 Book Sense 76. Her awards include a Writers at Work Fellowship in Nonfiction, a Pushcart Prize, and a Rockefeller's Bellagio Conference Center Fellowship. She currently teaches at Western New Mexico University and at the low-residency MFA program at Antioch University in Los Angeles. [top]

Tomaž Šalamun is widely recognized as one of the leading Central European poets. He is the author of more than thirty collections of poetry in Slovenian, and has had books translated into most of the European languages. He lives in Ljubljana and occasionally teaches in the USA. His recent books in English are Feast, A Ballad for Metka Kravosec, the Four Questions of Melancholy, Poker, and Blackboards. The Book For My Brother is due by Harcaurt in Spring 2006.

Click here for appearances by Tomaž Šalamun
at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference [top]

Katharine Sands is a literary agent with the Sarah Jane Freymann Literary Agency. She represents a wide range of authors in a broad range of categories: from category and literary fiction, chick lit, and dysfiction to faction to nonfiction (popular culture, entertainment, personal growth, leisure activities) to home arts (lifestyle, cookbooks, home design) to the more eclectic (travel, humor, and spirituality). Katharine has been a guest speaker on writing and publishing topics for Poets and Writers, The American Society of Journalists and Authors, New York University, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Her book reviews have appeared in Publishers Weekly and the New York Times Book Review. [top]

Kris Sanford lives in Tempe, Arizona, where she is an MFA candidate in photography at Arizona State University. She served as art editor for Hayden's Ferry Review and co-coordinated The Visual Text Project, a collaborative project that brought together ASU graduate students in creative writing and fine art to produce a portfolio of prints. She is one of the founding members of The Kitchenette, an artist collective and photographic gallery space in downtown Phoenix. Her art explores intimate relationships, specifically queer desire, through the use of appropriated images and text. [top]

Jeannine Savard is a poet and Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University. She has published several volumes of poetry, including Trumpeter and her most recent book, My Hand Upon Your Name. Her first collection, Snow Water Cove, won the University of Utah Poetry Competition in 1988 and was republished as part of Carnegie Mellon Press's Classic Contemporary Series in December 2005. Several of her poems are presently featured in Blackbird. New work will be forthcoming in the next issue of Hayden's Ferry Review. [top]

Elizabeth Searle is the author of three books: A Four-Sided Bed, My Body to You, and Celebrities in Disgrace, a novella which The New York Times Book Review called "a miniature masterpiece" and which is currently being adapted for film. She has taught in the Bennington M.F.A. and Stonecoast M.F.A. writing programs.  She began writing fiction at Arizona State University.

Click here for appearances by Elizabeth Searle
at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference [top]

Gary Short received his MFA from ASU and went on to become a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a Stegner fellow at Stanford University. He's published three books of poetry. His second book, Flying Over Sonny Liston, received the Western States Book Award. 10 Moons and 13 Horses was published in 2004. He is an editor of Ash Canyon Review and is visiting writer at the University of Tampa. [top]

Peggy Shumaker writes both poetry and nonfiction. Her most recent book is Blaze, a collaboration with the painter Kesler Woodward. Her previous books include Underground Rivers, Wings Moist from the Other World, The Circle of Totems, Braided River, and Esperanza's Hair. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. She has received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and several awards for teaching.  She served as poet in residence at the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell and as president of the board of AWP. Professor Emerita from University of Alaska Fairbanks, she currently teaches at the low-residency MFA Rainier Writing Workshop. [top]

Aaron Shurin is the author of eight books of poetry, including A’s Dream, Into Distances, The Paradise of Forms: Selected Poems, A Door and the recently published Involuntary Lyrics. He’s also the author of a collection of prose: Unbound: A Book of AIDS, and is completing a new book of narrative essays, entitled King of Shadows. His work has appeared in twenty national and international anthologies, and he has been awarded fellowships in both poetry and creative nonfiction from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. He lives in San Francisco, where he co-directs the Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.

Click here for appearances by Aaron Shurin
at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference [top]

Patricia Smith is the author of The Golf Widow's Revenge, a humorous book on golf, and Double Bind, a novella. Her newest work is a long novel, The Song of Salmon Woman, which is nearly ready for publication. She has been associated with Oolichan Press, one of Canada's foremost literary presses, since its inception in 1974. She lives with her husband, Ron Smith, on Vancouver Island. [top]

Ron Smith has played an essential role in the growth of literary, historical and public policy publishing in British Columbia. In 1974 he founded the publishing company Oolichan Books in Lantzville, and from 1988 to 1991 he was the fiction editor for Douglas & McIntyre. He was also instrumental in helping establish the first aboriginal press, Theytus Books, in 1981. He is the author of a suite of poems, Seasonal, a long poem, A Buddha Named Baudelaire, and two collections of poetry as well as a collection of fiction, What Men Know About Women. He lives with his wife, Patricia Smith, in Lantzville on Vancouver Island. [top]

Nat Sobel founded the literary agency Sobel Weber Associates, Inc. in 1970. He is a former bookseller, publisher's sales representative, marketing director, and subsidiary rights agent. His clients include Julianna Baggott, Beth Ann Fenelly, and Richard Russo. [top]

Mary Sojourner is the author of the 2004 memoir, Solace: Rituals of Loss and Desire; essay collection, Bonelight: Ruin and Grace in the New Southwest, short story collection Delicate, and the novels, Sisters of the Dream and Going Through Ghosts. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, following the threads of her third novel, Scylla, in a cabin with just enough space and Big Love to do what matters.

Click here for appearances by Mary Sojourner
at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference [top]

John Sparrow is a poet who is studying for a PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. His interests lie in technologies of writing for the page and screen and how texts can exploit these technologies in order to affect their readings. He was curator for three of the sessions at the E-poetry Conference 2005, London, which showcased electronic poetry from around the world. He is webmaster for the online How2 journal http://www.how2journal.com http://www.how2journal.com> which explores contemporary innovative writing by women worldwide. [top]

Michael A. Stackpole is an award-winning novelist, game and computer game designer. He published over thirty science fiction and fantasy novels since 1988, and is best known for his New York Times best-selling Star Wars® novels Rogue Squadron and I, Jedi. His work combines tight plots and suspense with strong character development. He lives in Scottsdale.

Click here for appearances by Michael A. Stackpole
at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference [top]

Indu Sundaresan is the author of The Twentieth Wife, for which she won the 2003 Washington State Book Award, and The Feast of Roses. Both novels are based on the life of an almost abandoned child who grows up to become Empress and eventually the most powerful woman in the Mughal dynasty that built the Taj Mahal in India. Her short fiction and essays have been published in literary magazines and on the web. She is currently working on a third novel set in India during the 1940s, scheduled to go to press in 2006.

Click here for appearances by Indu Sundaresan
at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference [top]

Gail Tsukiyama was born in San Francisco, California to a Chinese mother from Hong Kong and a Japanese father from Hawaii. She attended San Francisco State University and has been the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Award and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award. A resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, she has taught creative writing at San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley. She has been a freelance book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle and sat as a judge for the Kiriyama Book Prize. She is currently Book Review Editor for the online magazine Pacific Rim Voices. Her novels include The Samurai's Garden, The Language of Threads, and Dreaming Water. She is currently working on a new novel that will be released in 2006.

Gail Tsukiyama will not be participating in the 2006 ASU Writers Conference due to a family emergency.

Click here for appearances by Gail Tsukiyama
at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference [top]

David L. Ulin is the author of The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, which was named a Best Book of 2004 by the Chicago Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle. He edited Another City: Writing from Los Angeles, and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which received a California Book Award from the Commonwealth Club of California, and was selected by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as a Best of the Best for 2002. His essays and criticism have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, LA Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, and on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. He teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles. [top]

Sarah Vap received her M.F.A. in 2005 from Arizona State University. She has taught creative writing classes at ASU and Phoenix College, as well as to 1st through 12th graders with the Young Writers Program and the Arizona Commission of the Arts educational grants. She has won several awards for her poetry, and has published poems in journals such as Field, Barrow Street, Denver Quarterly, and Natural Bridge. Her poetry manuscript has been a finalist in several book competitions, including the National Poetry Series. [top]

Kevin Vaughan-Brubaker lives in Phoenix, Arizona with his wife, cats, and gecko. Aside from being a writer, Kevin is a musician, actor, sound designer, and cultural maven-at-large. He is the secretary of the board for Nightboat Books, a small press in NYC, and one of the founding members of Writer’s Bloc, a studio space/writer’s collective in downtown Phoenix. Kevin has an MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University, works for the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and teaches creative writing for University of Phoenix Online. [top]