Amina Gautier--February 2013

Amina Gautier is the winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction for her short story collectionAt-Risk. Gautier is the second African American writer to win this award in its thirty-year history. She is also a past winner of the Danahy Fiction Prize from Tampa Review. More than sixty-five of her short stories have been published and her fiction appears in African American Review, African Voices,Antioch Review, B&A: New Fiction, Cicada, Chattahoochee Review, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Iconoclast, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Nimrod,North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Opium.com, Pindeldyboz, Pleiades,Quarter After Eight, Red Rock Review, River Styx, Salt Hill, Shenandoah,Southeast Review, Southern Review, Southwest Review, Story Quarterly, StudioMagazine, Sycamore Review, Timber Creek Review, Today's Black Woman, Torch, and Yemassee among other places. She is also a writer, scholar, and professor.Following in the footsteps of the late nineteenth century African Americanintellectuals (Charles W. Chesnutt, W.E.B. DuBois, Frances E. W. Harper, andPauline Hopkins) who merged both critical and creative talents, Gautier's academic interests are two-fold. Her background as a scholar of 19th CenturyAmerican literature and, more generally, African American literature focuses on such nineteenth century American authors as Charles W. Chesnutt, Elleanor Eldridge, Benjamin Franklin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Walt Whitman. Gautier is a graduate of The Northfield Mount Hermon School(NMH), Stanford University, from which she earned both a bachelor and master's degree within four years, and the University of Pennsylvania where she received a master's degree and Ph.D. She has been a Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellow(now Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow) at Stanford University, a Fontaine Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, a Mitchem Dissertation Fellow at Marquette University, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Washington University in St.Louis. Her academic memberships include AWP, MLA, and MELUS. She is currently Assistant Professor of English at DePaul University, where she offers courses in creative writing and African American literature.




Rosalynde Vas Dias

Rosalynde Vas Dias is the 2011 winner of the Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry. She was born and raised in rural Pennsylvania. She is a graduate of Warren Wilson College's MFA Program for Writers. Her poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Crazyhorse, New Orleans Review, and The Pinch. Ms. Vas Dias lives in Providence, Rhode Island. Only Blue Body is her first book of poetry.

11/1 Edison State College, Charlotte

11/2 St. Leo University and Univ. of South Florida, Tampa

11/5 Eckerd College, St. Petersburg

11/6 Unversity of Tampa

11/7  Valencia College, Orlando/Winter Park

11/8-10  Other Words Conference, Flagler College, St. Augustine





Michael Martone--September 2012

Michael Martone's most recent books are Four for a Quarter; Not Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fiction from the Flyover; Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins, a collection of essays; and Double-wide, his collected early stories. Michael Martone, a memoir in contributor’s notes, Unconventions, Writing on Writing, and Rules of Thumb, edited with Susan Neville, were all published recently. He is also the author of The Blue Guide to Indiana, published by FC2. The University of Georgia Press published his book of essays, The Flatness and Other Landscapes, winner of the AWP Award for Nonfiction, in 2000.

Martone was born and grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He attended Butler University and graduated from Indiana University. He holds the MA from The Writing Seminars of The Johns Hopkins University.

Martone has won two Fellowships from the NEA and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. His stories have won awards in the Italian Americana fiction contest, the Florida Review Short Story Contest, the Story magazine Short, Short Story Contest, the Margaret Jones Fiction Prize of Black Ice Magazine, and the first World's Best Short, Short Story Contest. His stories and essays have appeared and been cited in the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Stories and The Best American Essays anthologies.

Michael Martone is currently a Professor at the University of Alabama where he has been teaching since 1996. He has been a faculty member of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College since 1988. He has taught at Iowa State University, Harvard University, and Syracuse University.