Cristina García is the author of five novels: Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, A Handbook to Luck, and The Lady Matador's Hotel. García has edited two anthologies, Cubanísimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature and Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature. Two works for young readers, The Dog Who Loved the Moon, and I Wanna Be Your Shoebox were published in 2008. A collection of poetry, The Lesser Tragedy of Death, was recently published by Akashic Press. García's work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into a dozen languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA grant, among others. She is currently the artistic director for the Centrum Writers Exchange in Port Townsend, Washington and has taught literature and writing at numerous universities. This coming fall, García will be a Visiting Professor at the University of Texas-Austin. She is also delighted to announce that she has accepted a permanent position with Texas Tech University as Professor of Creative Writing and will teach there every spring semester starting in 2011.

Dean Rader has published widely in the fields of poetry, American Indian studies, and popular culture. His debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize, judged by Claudia Keelan. In 2009, Kelly Cherry selected his poem “Hesiod in Oklahoma, 1934” for the prestigious Sow’s Ear Poetry Prize. Other poems have appeared in Cincinnati Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Quarterly West, Colorado Review, Poet Lore, The MacGuffin, Connecticut Review, POOL, Borderlands, and many others. He is the author of a best-selling textbook on writing and popular culture, The World is a Text (with Jonathan Silverman), which just went into its fourth edition. With poet Janice Gould, he co-edited Speak To Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry (University of Arizona Press, 2003), the first collection of essays devoted to Native American poetry. Most recently, he curated a special issue of Sentence devoted to American Indian prose poetry. His newest scholarly book, Engaged Resistance: Contemporary American Indian Art, Literature, and Film is forthcoming in 2011 from the University of Texas Press. Rader blogs about the intersection of literature, culture, politics and media at The Weekly Rader, and he reviews poetry regularly for The San Francisco Chronicle for whom he has also contributed a number of op-ed pieces. He has taught at SUNYBinghamton, Georgia Tech, and Texas Lutheran University. At present, he is a professor of English at the University of San Francisco.