Gerry LaFemina--November 2011

Gerry LaFemina's newest title from Anhinga Press is Vanishing Horizon; he's also the author of five previous collections of poetry, including Graffiti Heart (winner of the Anthony Piccione Prize in Poetry), The Window Facing Winter and The Parakeets of Brooklyn (winner of the Bordighera Prize); two collections of prose poems; and Wish List, a collection of short stories. A former punk musician and a former member of the Associated Writing Programs Board of Directors, he directs the Frostburg Center for Creative Writing at Frostburg State University, where he also teaches. He divides his time between Maryland and New York.

Erika Meitner--November 2011

Erika Meitner's newest title from Anhinga Press is Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls; she is also the author of Inventory at the All-night Drugstore (An­hinga Press, 2003), winner of the 2002 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and Ideal Cities (Harper Perennial, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Her poems have been anthologized widely, and have ap­peared in journals including Tin House, The New Republic, The Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Poetry Review, and on Slate.com. She is currently an assistant professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she teaches in the MFA program.

Peter Trachtenberg--October 2011

Peter Trachtenberg is the author of The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning (Little, Brown 2008), a book that combines reportage, memoir, and moral philosophy to explore suffering and its narratives, which won the 2009 Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for works that contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity. In 1997, his debut book, Seven Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh (Crown) was published. Of this book, the Montreal Gazette wrote, “Seven Tattoos is like a Lou Reed record: off-key and on the mark at the same time….A reminder that the memoir, when it’s revealing and reflective, can go where the best literature has always sought to go—straight to the human heart.”

Trachtenberg’s fiction, essays, and reportage have appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, Bomb, A Public Space, Bidoun, O: The Oprah Magazine, and The New York Times Travel Magazine. He has performed his monologues at Dixon Place, PS 122, and The Kitchen and broadcast commentaries on NPR’s All Things Considered. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, the Nelson Algren Prize for Short Fiction, an Artist's Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a 2010-2011 Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2008-2009 he was a visiting professor of creative nonfiction at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.