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Nicholson Baker was born in 1957 in New York City, and he grew up in Rochester, New York. He attended Rochester’s Eastman School of Music for a year and received a BA from Haverford College in 1979. He has worked as a bassoonist, a securities analyst, a technical writer, a short-order cook, a night-shift word processor, and a photographer — and he has been writing full time since 1987. He is the author of seven novels and four works of nonfiction. He is the coauthor, with his wife, Margaret Brentano, of The World on Sunday: Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer’s Newspaper. Baker’s essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Review of Books, Esquire, Best American Short Stories, and Best American Essays. In 1999 he and his wife established a nonprofit corporation, the American Newspaper Repository, to rescue a large collection of American newspapers; in 2004 the repository’s holdings became a gift to Duke University. Baker is the recipient of the 2001 National Book Critics Circle award for Double Fold, the San Francisco–based James Madison Freedom of Information Award, and the 2004 Katherine Anne Porter Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Baker lives with his wife and children in Maine.

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Michael J. Brien teaches American literature and creative writing at the Online University for Southern New Hampshire University. He is also the editor of the university’s literary magazine, Amoskeag. A long-time member of the New Hampshire Writers’ Project and a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has published nearly one hundred short stories, poems, and feature articles in various regional and national magazines and has read his work on public radio. He is a New Hampshire Humanities Council book discussion scholar and a recipient of writing grants from the Iowa, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire state art councils.

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Joni B. Cole is the cofounder of the Writer’s Center in White River Junction and author of Toxic Feedback: Helping Writers Survive and Thrive (“strongly recommended” for writers and teachers by Library Journal). She is also the author of Water Cooler Diaries: Women across America Share Their Day at Work (“both fascinating and eye-opening,” Publishers Weekly). Cole’s essays appear in her monthly newspaper column, and she is a frequent speaker at writing conferences around the country.

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Jim Collins, a lifelong resident of New Hampshire, is a professional writer whose work has appeared in Outside, Reader’s Digest, Glamour, This Old House magazine, Boston, and Yankee, among other publications. Two of his magazine articles have been noted in the Best American Sportswriting anthology. He has been connected with Yankee magazine for more than two decades, including two years as editor. He was an acting editor of the award-winning alumni magazine at Dartmouth, where he graduated in 1984. His book The Last Best League won the 2005 New Hampshire Literary Award for Outstanding Book of Nonfiction.

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Hallie Ephron is a writer and book reviewer. Her best-selling solo debut novel, Never Tell a Lie, which reviewers call a Hitchcockian page-turner, has been optioned for film and translated into seven languages. Ephron is also an award-winning book reviewer for the Boston Globe and is author of two books about books — The Bibliophile’s Devotional and 1001 Books for Every Mood. She also coauthored five Dr. Peter Zak mystery novels as G. H. Ephron. Her book Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel was an Edgar Award nominee. She is a contributor to the Writer magazine. Hallie Ephron is the third of four writing Ephron sisters, and her parents, Henry and Phoebe Ephron, wrote screenplays for movie classics like The Desk Set and Carousel. She grew up in southern California but didn’t start writing fiction until she got a phone call from a magazine writer who wanted to write a piece about Hallie because she was, among the Ephrons, “the only one that didn’t write.”.

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Alice B. Fogel’s most recent book of poetry is Be That Empty, which was number eight on the Poetry Foundation’s best-seller list for four weeks in 2008. A recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Fogel has published poetry in the Best American Poetry series, Poet’s Choice, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Pleiades, and many other anthologies and journals. Currently on the adjunct staff at Colby-Sawyer College, she also works as a writing mentor and workshop leader, professional development instructor, reading group facilitator, and artist in the schools. Her new book, Strange Terrain: A Poetry Handbook for the Reluctant Reader (2009), is a nonacademic guide for those who don’t “get” poetry.

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Jacqueline Gens is a cofounder of the New England College MFA Program in Poetry, where she has been codirector since 2001. For many years she worked at the Naropa Institute and for the late Allen Ginsberg, studying contemplative poetics at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. She has lectured extensively on the Beats and Buddhist poetry for over a decade. Her chapbook, Primo Pensiero, with a foreword by Anne Waldman, was published in 2008 by Shivastan Press.

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Katherine Harbaugh received her MFA in studio art and writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she focused on the serendipitous relationship between text and image in art and writing. Her work has appeared in Annual Guide for the Arts Chicago and Text Off the Page publications. She has exhibited her work in the G2 Gallery and Café Art in Chicago. Harbaugh currently lives in Hanover, where she works at Dartmouth Medical School.

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John Herman is, as NH Magazine notes, “a spokesman for the new revolution in communications media.” An artist, writer, and teacher, he also serves as an emerging media trainer and consultant, covering a wide range of topics in the cross section of technology and culture. He founded and hosts the blog NH Media Makers. His recent speaking topics have included live web streaming for Boston University’s College of Communication, collaborative art on the Web (Pecha Kucha), and media literacy in the twenty-first century at the Woods Hole Film Festival. Recently he was a featured comedy performer at the Tokyo Impro Festival. The Boston Globe calls Herman a “new-media guru.” Indie culture touchstone Pitchfork calls him “a writer, a media maker and a compulsive ringleader.” In 2008  Herman was the first NHWP Literary Idol winner at the New Hampshire Writers’ Trail: Portsmouth Literary Festival.

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James Harms is the author of six books of poetry including, most recently, After West and Freeways and Aqueducts, both from Carnegie Mellon University Press. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; the PEN/Revson Fellowship; the John Ciardi Fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference; three Pushcart Prizes; fellowships in creative writing from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Academy of American Poets Prize; and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. He was named a Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching/CASE United States Professor of the Year for West Virginia and recently received the Caperton Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Writing. Harms lives with his family in Morgantown, West Virginia, where he is a professor of English at West Virginia University. He also directs the MFA Program in Poetry at New England College.

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Kermit Hummel is editorial director of the Countryman Press, a division of W. W. Norton located in Woodstock, Vermont. Prior to joining Countryman, Hummel ran divisions of HarperCollins and St. Martin’s Press in New York City..

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Mark Karlins is the writer of five picture books, including Music Over Manhattan, called “a new classic” by Daniel Pinkwater on National Public Radio, and Mendel’s Ladder, a Smithsonian Notable Book of the Year. Karlins’s sense of humor, wacky characters, and belief in the potential of all children to go beyond themselves are hallmarks of his work. His most recent picture book is Starring Lorenzo, and Einstein Too. He has also published two books of poetry for adults. Karlins teaches at Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), where his courses have focused on writing, film, Native American literature, and children’s literature. One of his favorite courses, taught at the Museum School, is on writing for children, from picture books to young adult novels. He also teaches private workshops on writing for children out of his home.

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Clark E. Knowles lives in Portsmouth with his wife, Gail, his daughter, Grace, and a dopey beagle named Fielding. The New Hampshire Council on the Arts awarded him an Individual Artist Fellowship for 2009. He teaches writing at the University of New Hampshire and received his MFA in writing and literature from Bennington College. His fiction has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Scribner’s Best of Fiction Workshops 1999, the Flying Horse Review, Red Rock Review, Inkwell Journal, and Glimmer Train Stories. He is currently working on a novel (or two).

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Kristen Laine is an award-winning journalist whose commentaries can be heard on Vermont Public Radio. Her first book, American Band, a narrative nonfiction chronicle of one season in an Indiana high school marching band, won the 2007 PEN New England / L.L. Winship award for nonfiction. She holds degrees in English and American literature and language from Harvard and Radcliffe College and the University of Wisconsin, where she won a fiction prize. She has worked as a housecleaner and Outward Bound instructor; edited newsletters on solid and hazardous waste, books, and annual reports; written ads and box copy, computer manuals, and magazine articles; and oversaw the creation of several early online publications, including Outside Online. She lives in New Hampshire with the writer Jim Collins and their two children.

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Gretchen Legler is a professor in the BFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Maine Farmington and also teaches in the MFA Program in Fiction and Nonfiction at Southern New Hampshire University. Her nonfiction books include All the Powerful Invisible Things: A Sportswoman’s Notebook and On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station Antarctica.

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Elise Lemire is the author of Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts and “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America, both published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. She is associate professor of literature at Purchase College, SUNY.

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Diane Les Becquets was hailed by Publisher’s Weekly as a “writer to watch” after the publication her debut novel, The Stones of Mourning Creek. Since then she has published two other novels, Love, Cajun Style and Season of Ice, the latter being the recipient a PEN American Fellowship. Les Becquets is the director of creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University and the assistant director of the university’s low-residency MFA Program in Fiction and Nonfiction. She has been a guest at the Arkansas Book Festival and the Telluride Council on the Arts and has taught writing workshops at various venues across the country, including the University of Mississippi, Auburn University, the New Hampshire Writer’s Project, the Department of Forestry, Ocean Park Writer’s Conference, and shelters for Katrina victims. Before teaching, she worked as a journalist for twelve years. She is currently working on a new novel, Backface, set in northwestern Colorado.

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Peter Money, former student of the late Beat legend Allen Ginsberg, is the founder of three literary journals: Writer’s Bloc, Lame Duck, and Across Borders. His work has been featured in many journals and on Garrison Keillor’s NPR program The Writer’s Almanac. Money’s books include These Are My Shoes, Minor Roads, A Big Yellow, Between Ourselves, Instruments, Finding It: Selected Poems, To day—Minutes only, and the underground novella Che, which is forthcoming in a larger edition. Money has been the Literature and Writing Department chair at Lebanon College. He is among the original faculty at the Center For Cartoon Studies and is the director and editor of Harbor Mountain Press.

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Joseph Monninger has published nine novels and three nonfiction books, including the memoir Home Waters, and has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. He was the 2009 New Hampshire Literary Award winner for his young adult novel, Hippie Chick. Monninger lives and teaches in New Hampshire, where his family runs a sled-dog team.

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Roland Pease is the fiction and poetry editor of Steerforth Press, in Hanover and the editor of Zoland Poetry, an annual of original poems and translations from around the world. After founding Zoland Books in 1987, Pease published and edited fiction writers Ha Jin, Sheila Kohler, A. J. Mojtabai, and Alfred Alcorn, among others, and poets Kevin Young, Ange Mlinko, Anne Porter, Patricia Smith, and others. At Steerforth Press. he has edited Rawi Hage, Castle Freeman, Peter Behrens, and others. Pease and his wife divide their time between Cambridge, Massachusetts., and Woodstock, Vermont. He works on his own poems daily and is always on the lookout for great new writing.

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Ann Collette spent 15 years as a freelance writer and editor before joining the Helen Rees Literary Agency ten years ago, a background that comes in handy when developing first novels. Her fiction list includes literary, horror, mystery, women’s fiction, and crime novelists, including Steven Sidor and Vicki Lane. Her non-fiction interests include memoir, biography, pop culture, and military (particularly Vietnam and anything set in the Asian theater).

Rebecca Rule gathers and tells stories in New England. Her books include The Best Revenge: Short Stories; Could Have Been Worse: True Stories, Embellishments, and Outright Lies; and Live Free and Eat Pie: A Storyteller’s Guide to New Hampshire. She also hosts the New Hampshire Authors Series on New Hampshire Public Television. She blogs, almost daily, at livefreeandeatpie.com.

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Melissa Stewart is the award-winning author of more than one hundred science books for children. After earning a bachelor’s degree in biology from Union College in Schenectady, New York, and a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University, Stewart worked as a children’s book editor for nine years before becoming a full-time writer in 2000. She has written everything from board books for preschoolers to magazine articles for adults. Stewart believes that nothing brings nonfiction writing to life like firsthand research. When she isn’t writing or exploring the natural world, she spends time speaking at schools, libraries, nature centers, and educator conferences. Stewart is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators board of advisors and a judge for the American Institute of Physics Children’s Science Writing Award.

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Jeremy Townsend began her publishing career in 1981 at W. W. Norton & Company. She subsequently started a small press, specializing in animal and nature books, and in 2003 opened PublishingWorks, Inc., which has grown into a diverse independent press offering debut fiction and cutting edge nonfiction. Recently, PublishingWorks expanded to include Peapod Press, a subsidy press specializing in children’s and regional titles. Jeremy lives in Exeter, New Hampshire, with her husband and two children.

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Chris Volpe is a regular contributor to Art New England and the author of The Boston School Legacy, an examination of American Impressionist painting. Volpe teaches art history and writing at Chester College of New England and the New Hampshire Institute of Art. He holds degrees from Stony Brook University and the University of New Hampshire. He is currently writing the first biographical and critical assessment of an important yet-unknown female American landscape artist from the nineteenth century. He is also a working oil painter represented by Kennedy Studio in Portsmouth and Bowersock Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

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Lissa Warren is vice president, senior director of publicity and acquiring editor at Da Capo Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. The author of The Savvy Author’s Guide to Book Publicity, she teaches at Emerson College and in Boston University’s publishing certificate program. Her poetry has appeared in many literary journals, and she’s a poetry editor for Post Road.

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Ann Joslin Williams is the author of The Woman in the Woods, a collection of linked stories, which won the 2005 Spokane Prize. She earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She is also the recipient of a 2008 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her work has appeared Storyquarterly, the Iowa Review, the Missouri Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Her first novel will be published by Bloomsbury, USA, in spring 2011. She is an assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire.

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Joanne Wyckoff is an agent in the Boston office of Zachary Shuster Harmsworth.  Before becoming an agent, she worked as Senior Editor at the Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, and as Executive Editor at Beacon Press.  As an agent, Joanne represents nonfiction and fiction.  She has a great deal of experience working with academics and experts in a wide variety of fields, helping them develop and write books for a broad market.  She also has a particular love of the memoir and is always looking for exciting new voices in this genre.  Her nonfiction list includes memoir, psychology, women’s issues, education, health and wellness, parenting, serious self-help, narrative nonfiction, natural history, and spirituality.  In fiction, her interests run to literary and commercial women’s fiction, novels that evoke a strong sense of place, and historical novels.

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