Sherman Alexie, a four-time world heavyweight championship poet and occasional stand-up comic, has just released his first novel in ten years, Flight. A Spokane–Coeur d’Alene Native American, he is the best-selling author of numerous other books, including the novel Indian Killer and the Toughest Indian in the World and Ten Little Indians, both collections of short stories, as well as nearly a dozen volumes of poetry. His first novel, Reservation Blues, won the Murray Morgan Prize and the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award, as well as earning him a listing among Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Alexie wrote and directed "The Business of Fancydancing" and also wrote the screenplay for "Smoke Signals", a film based on one of the stories in his collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven , for which Alexie received a PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Book of Fiction. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1998, where it won the Audience Award and the Filmmakers Trophy. Photo: Rob Casey

A professor of recreation management at Eastern Washington University, Barbara Brock is widely known for her innovative research into TV-free lifestyles. Articles about her work have appeared in Time magazine and in numerous other publications, including Parenting, Woman's Day, Family Circle, and Good Housekeeping. Perhaps ironically, she has also been interviewed on the Today Show. For over two decades now, she and her family (and a gaggle of pets) have lived very happily without television.

Henry Carlile was born in San Francisco and grew up in the Pacific Northwest . He attended the University of Washington , where he studied with poets Theodore Roethke, Henry Reed, and Elizabeth Bishop. In 1967 he began teaching at Portland State University and from 1978 to 1980 was a visiting lecturer at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His first book, The Rough-Hewn Table, won the Devins Award in 1971. Carlile is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, two PEN Syndicated Fiction awards, and Crazyhorse magazine's 1988 Poetry Award and has held grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Oregon Arts Commission, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. He lives in Portland , Oregon .

Beth Cooley has published two novels for young adult readers, Shelter and Ostrich Eye, the latter winner of the 2002 Delacorte Prize. She also writes poetry and literary criticism. A native of North Carolina, Cooley moved to Spokane with her husband and two daughters in 1992. She teaches literature and creative writing at Gonzaga University.

Charles D’Ambrosio is the author of the masterful short stories collected in The Dead Fish Museum and The Point , as well as a collection of essays, Orphans. His fiction has appeared in t he New Yorker, the Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, and A Public Space. In 2006, he won a Whiting Writers’ Award, which honors emerging writers of exceptional talent and promise. A Seattle native, D’Ambrosio now lives in Portland , Oregon .

Carmela D’Amico completed her first children’s book when she was just five and has been writing ever since. Her work as a freelance writer has appeared in magazines and newspapers throughout the Northwest. She also collaborates with her husband, Steven, on the Ella the Elephant books for children, one of which, Ella the Elegant Elephant, won a PNBA Book Award in 2005. Illustrator Steven D’Amico began his art career by drawing dinosaurs and superheroes at age four. In the 1980s he dropped out of the Cornish College of the Arts to become a window display artist for Tower Records and, later, Macy’s. He currently works as a senior designer at Smashing Ideas, Inc., an innovative entertainment and marketing services studio based in Seattle .

Jim Daniels’s most recent book, Revolt of the Crash-Test Dummies, won the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry and was published by Eastern Washington University Press earlier this year. He is the author of nine other books of poems, as well as three collections of short fiction and two screenplays. The recipient of numerous awards, including the Brittingham Prize for Poetry, he holds the Thomas Stockham Baker Chair in English at Carnegie Mellon University, where he directs the creative writing program.

For the past seventeen years, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Timothy Egan has worked on the West Coast as a writer for the New York Times, first as the Pacific Northwest correspondent and now as a national enterprise reporter. Egan is also the author of five books. The Worst Hard Time, a history of the environmental and human devastation wrought by the Dust Bowl years told through the eyes of those who survived it, won the 2006 National Book Award for nonfiction, making Egan only the fourth Washington State resident to win this prestigious literary prize since its inception in 1950. The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest, Egan’s insightful and sometimes bittersweet account of his travels through the area in which he was raised, has been a regional bestseller for twelve years. A poll conducted by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer rated it one of ten essential books ever written about the region. His collection of nonfiction essays on the West, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West, won the 1999 Governor’s Writing Award from Washington State, as well as the Mountains and Plains Booksellers’ Association Award . He is a featured radio essayist for the BBC in the slot once occupied by Alistair Cooke. Egan, who was raised in Spokane, graduated from the University of Washington and was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by Whitman College in 2000 for his writings about the land.

Anthony Flinn, professor of English at Eastern Washington University, is a specialist in British and American modernist poetry. He is the author of Approaching Authority: Transpersonal Gestures in the Poetry of Yeats, Eliot, and Williams, as well as of works on the feminism of William Carlos Williams and the semiotics of film and the graphic arts. For Spokane Public Radio, Flinn was a writer for the satiric arts show, A Fine Frenzy, which he co-hosted with Kendall Feeney, and has also read a number of novels and stories for The Bookshelf.

Tess Gallagher is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, screenplay writer, and translator. Her most recent books are a collection of poems, Dear Ghosts, and a literary memoir, Soul Barnacles, about her life with well-known short story writer Raymond Carver, who died in 1988. In addition, Eastern Washington University Press recently released Distant Rain, an accordion-style volume that contains the text of a conversation between Gallagher and Buddhist nun and novelist Jakuchō Setouchi, which unfolds against a backdrop of artwork by Keiko Hara. Gallagher’s previous poetry collections include Moon Crossing Bridge and Amplitude: New and Selected Poems. She lives in Port Angeles, Washington.

Pamela Holway did graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley, where her focus was Sanskrit literature. Impressed by the wide array of job opportunities in her chosen field, she jettisoned her Ph.D. dissertation and fled into the world of publishing. In addition to working freelance, she has been a production editor at the University of California Press and at Stanford University Press, where she also served as managing editor. She joined Eastern Washington University Press in December 2005.

Christopher Howell’s eighth collection of poems, Light’s Ladder, won the Washington State Book Award in 2005. His poems, essays, and translations have also appeared in a number of anthologies and journals, including Antioch Review, Colorado Review, Crazy Horse, Denver Quarterly, Field, Gettysburg Review, Harper’s, Hudson Review, Iowa Review, Northwest Review, Poetry Northwest, Southern Review and Volt. He has been recipient of three Pushcart Prizes and two National Endowment fellowships, as well as a number of other awards. In addition to teaching Creative Writing at Eastern Washington University, he is Senior Editor for Eastern Washington University Press.

Jonathan Johnson is the author of two collections of poetry: Mastodon, 80% Complete and In the Land We Imagined Ourselves (forthcoming in 2007). His poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry anthology and numerous other collections, as well as in recent issues of the Southern Review, Ploughshares, the North American Review, and Prairie Schooner. Johnson is also the author of a memoir, Hannah and the Mountain: Notes Toward a Wilderness Fatherhood. He is the director of the Inland Northwest Center for Writers, Eastern Washington University’s MFA program in creative writing. Johnson spends as much time as he can in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and at the secluded log cabin that he and his wife built on the Johnson family farm in northern Idaho.

We regret that Ms. Karbo will not be at the festival. Please enjoy her books: Trespassers Welcome Here, Minerva Clark Goes to the Dogs, The Stuff of Life, and How to Hepburn: Lessons on Life from Kate the Great (forthcoming in May 2007). Look for Karen Karbo at Get Lit! 2008.

John Keeble’s collection of stories, Nocturnal America , won the Prairie Schooner prize in fiction and was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2006. He is also the author of four novels, including Yellowfish and Broken Ground, and a work of nonfiction, Out of the Channel: The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Prince William Sound . Short works of fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including Outside, the Village Voice, American Short Fiction, Zyzzyva, the Idaho Review, and Best American Short Stories. He has held a Guggenheim fellowship and was the writer for an award-winning PBS documentary on the life of Raymond Carver, "To Write and Keep Kind" .A longstanding member of MFA faculty at Eastern Washington University and now professor emeritus, he has also served as the visiting chair in creative writing at the University of Alabama on three separate occasions and as visiting professor of creative writing for one additional year.

Bounsang Khamkeo was formerly a member of the Laotian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and worked at the Lao Mekong Committee of the United Nations in Vientiane . Seized by the Pathet Lao in the wake of the communist revolution of December 1975, he survived more than seven years in harsh prison conditions before finally being released during the communist thaw in the 1980s. I Little Slave (Eastern Washington University Press) is the account of his ordeal. He now lives in Vancouver , Washington , with his wife, Vieng, and four children, and works as a behavioral health counselor at Oregon Health and Science University .

Natalie Kusz is the author of the memoir Road Song, and has published essays in Harper's, Threepenny Review, McCall's, Real Simple, and other periodicals. Her work has earned, among other honors, a Whiting Writer's Award, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the NEA, the Bush Foundation, and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. A former faculty member of Bethel College and of Harvard University , she now teaches in the MFA program at Eastern Washington University .

Jonathan Lethem is “one of the most inventive writers on the planet,” according to the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle, and “also one of the funniest.” He is the genre-crossing author of six novels, including the best sellers The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, for which he won a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Macallan Gold Dagger for crime fiction, and a Salon Book Award. He has also published two volumes of short stories, Men and Cartoons and The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye, as well as a collection of essays, The Disappointment Artist. In 2005, Lethem—whose most recent novel is the satiric romantic comedy You Don’t Love Me Yet—was honored with a MacArthur Fellowship. He divides his time between his birthplace, Brooklyn, and Maine. Photo: Peter Bellamy

The author of the novel Safe in Heaven Dead, Samuel Ligon is one of the contributors to the forthcoming anthology The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Sonic Youth . His stories have appeared in Post Road, StoryQuarterly, Other Voices, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Manoa, The Quarterly, SleepingFish , and other publications. Ligon teaches at Eastern Washington University’s Inland Northwest Center for Writers.

After graduating from Eastern Oregon University in 1974, Ed Marquand worked in graphic design studios in Los Angeles before moving to Seattle and starting Marquand Books in 1978. With the aid of a small staff, he produces fine art books for museums, artists, architects, galleries, and art book publishers, among them the National Gallery of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Seattle Art Museum, Harry N. Abrams, Rizzoli USA, Chronicle Books, and the University of Washington Press. Marquand is also a partner in iocolor, a Seattle digital prepress company, and is developing Mighty Tieton, an incubator for artisan businesses, located in the Yakima Valley. There, Marquand operates a letterpress print shop and hand book bindery, where he and his staff are able to produce and print limited edition books for his art clientele.

Tod Marshall’s first collection of poetry, Dare Say, was the 2002 winner of the University of Georgia’s Contemporary Poetry Series. He has also published a collection of interviews he conducted with twenty contemporary poets, Range of the Possible, and edited Range of Voices, an anthology that offers five poems by each of the poets he interviewed. In 2003, he was selected as the Wilson Visiting Poet at Albion College in Albion, Michigan, a distinction he shares with poets Gwendolyn Brooks, Gary Snyder, Stephen Spender, and Galway Kinnell. The Washington Artist Trust awarded him a GAP grant in 2002 and a fellowship in 2005. Marshall, whose work has appeared widely, earned an MFA from Eastern Washington University and a PhD from the University of Kansas. He lives in Spokane, Washington, and teaches at Gonzaga University. He is the winner of the 2007 Distinguished Alumni Award from Eastern Washington University’s MFA program in creative writing.

Joseph Millar is the author of two collections of poetry, Overtime, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award, and Fortune, which appeared from Eastern Washington Press earlier this year. His poems, known for their clean lyric voice and stark, unsparing narratives, have also been featured in literary magazines such as Shenandoah, Double Take, New Letters, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, and Manoa and have won him fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Montalvo Center for the Arts, and Oregon Literary Arts. After earning an MA from Johns Hopkins in 1970, Millar spent twenty-five years in the San Francisco Bay Area, working at a variety of jobs. In 1997 he gave up his position as a telephone installation foreman to move to western Oregon and teach at Oregon State University and in Pacific University’s low residency MFA program.

Imbued with dignity, insight, and whatever strength they are able to muster, Walter Mosley’s characters confront what it means to be black and male in America while struggling to build a life of purpose and fulfillment. Best known for his popular mysteries featuring private investigator Easy Rawlins, Mosley also writes blues novels, sci-fi, and young adult fiction. His most recent book is Killing Johnny Fry: A Sexistentialist Novel , to be followed this spring by This Year You Write Your Novel, a guide for writers. He has been hailed by the New York Times Book Review as “a literary artist as well as a master of mystery” and by the Boston Globe as “one of the nation’s finest writers.” In the opinion of Library Journal, his novel Fortunate Son “deserves to be on the shelves of every library.” In his essays and nonfiction Mosley explores the African-American perspective and the ways in which the black community can contribute to the political, economic, and social fabric of America . He currently serves on the boards of the Poetry Society of America and TransAfrica and is the first African American to sit on the National Book Foundation’s influential board of directors. Among his many honors are an O’Henry Award, a Grammy Award (for liner notes), a Sundance Risk-Taker Award, and the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award. His short fiction has been published in the New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy , and GQ .

Ann Pancake won the 2000 Bakeless Award for her collection of short stories Given Ground. Her fiction and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Glimmer Train, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, and New Stories from theSouth . Among her many honors are a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Glasgow Prize, a Julia Peterkin Award, and an NEA Fellowship, in addition to which she has been awarded creative writing fellowships from the states of Washington, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. She holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Washington and now teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. Her novel about mountaintop removal mining in southern West Virginia, Strange As This Weather Has Been, will be published by Shoemaker & Hoard in November of this year.

Alberto Ríos ’s nine collections of poetry include The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and most recently The Theater of Night. He has also written three volumes of short stories and a memoir, Capirotada, about growing up on the Mexican border, which won the Latino Literary Hall of Fame Award. Ríos is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Walt Whitman Award, the Western States Book Award for Fiction, and six Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and fiction. His work is regularly taught and translated and has been adapted to dance and both classical and popular music. A Regent’s Professor and the Katharine C. Turner Chair in English, Ríos has taught for the past twenty-five years at Arizona State University .

Greg Simon was born in Minnesota but has spent most of his life in the Pacific Northwest. Educated in Seattle, Iowa City, and Palo Alto, where he studied poetry and translation with teachers such as Mark Strand, Donald Justice, Donald Davie, and John Felstiner, he holds a BA in English from the University of Washington and an MFA in creative writing from Stanford. He has translated poetry from Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Russian, including selections from the work of Gastón Baquero (The Angel of Rain), Federico García Lorca (Poet in New York), and Rubén Darío. He has also edited books for Tess Gallagher and the Bosnian poet Ferida Duraković and is currently an associate editor with Trask House Books and The Salt River Review. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and two daughters, in an old wooden house overlooking the Willamette River.

M. L. Smoker belongs to the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes of the Fort Peck Reservation in northeastern Montana and draws inspiration for her writing from her family's home located on Tabexa Wakpa (Frog Creek). A graduate of Pepperdine University, she attended UCLA and the University of Colorado, where she was a Battrick Fellow, and holds an MFA from the University of Montana in Missoula, where she was a recipient of the Richard Hugo Fellowship. In the words of Sherman Alexie, Smoker’s poetry is “tough, funny, magical, but not in a goofy way. This is blue-collar magic.” Her first collection, Another Attempt at Rescue, was published by Hanging Loose Press in the spring of 2005. Her poems have also appeared in Shenendoah and the South Dakota Review and have been translated for Acoma, an Italian literary journal published by the University of Rome. M. L. Smoker currently resides in Helena, Montana, where she works in the Indian Education Division of the Office of Public Instruction.

Gregory Spatz is the author of the novels Fiddler's Dream and No One But Us and of a story collection, Wonderful Tricks. His stories have appeared in many publications, including the New Yorker, the Iowa Review, Shenandoah, and the New England Review. The recipient of a Michener Fellowship, an Iowa Arts Fellowship, and a Washington State Book Award, he teaches at Eastern Washington University in Spokane. Spatz also plays the fiddle in the JUNO-nominated bluegrass band John Reischman and the Jaybirds.

Lisa M. Steinman, whose fifth volume of poetry is Carslaw’s Sequences, teaches at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, and coedits the poetry magazine Hubbub. The author of three books about poetry—Made in America, Masters of Repetition, and How to Think About Poetry and Poetics (forthcoming from Blackwell)—she has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation. Her poems have been published in the Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, the Notre Dame Review, the Women’s Review of Books, and elsewhere. A recent recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, she is currently writing a book about contemporary American poetry with the working title What Are Poems Good For?

Rachel Toor's ambition, on graduating from Yale University, was to work on a dude ranch in Wyoming (never having been to a dude ranch—or to Wyoming). Moving to Missoula, Montana, for an MFA in creative writing is the closest she's come. After a dozen years as an editor of scholarly books at Oxford and Duke University Presses, she did a stint in college admissions, quitting to write Admissions Confidential: An Insider's Account of the Elite College Selection Process and a memoir, The Pig and I: How I Learned to Love Men (Almost) As Much As I Love My Pets. She has also worked as a senior writer for Running Times magazine, and her next book, Personal Record: One Woman's Love Affair with Running, or Why Running for Many Hours on Rocky, Rooty, and Gnarly Trails Where You Get Muddy and Bloody and Your Whole Everything Hurts So Much That You're Crying for Your Mommy Is the Most Fun a Person Can Ever Have ,is due out in the fall of 2008. Her work has appeared in Glamour , Reader's Digest, Marathon & Beyond ,and a variety of other more academically oriented publications.

Nance Van Winckel 's fourth collection of poetry is Beside Ourselves. Recent poems have appeared in APR, Ploughshares, New Letters, and the Massachusetts Review, and a new collection, entitled No Starling, will be out this year from the University of Washington Press. She has also published three collections of short stories, including Quake, which won the 1998 Paterson Fiction Prize, and, most recently, Curtain Creek Farm. New stories appear in the Georgia Review, Colorado Review, and AGNI. She has received a Pushcart Prize, Poetry magazine’s Friends of Literature Award, and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and in 2006 was awarded a Christopher Isherwood Fiction Fellowship for a work in progress. Van Winckel teaches in the creative writing program at Eastern Washington University .

Canadian poet and essayist Tom Wayman is the author of well over a dozen collections of poems, with his latest, High Speed Through Shoaling Water , due out this spring. Born in Hawkesbury, Ontario, a pulp mill town on the Ottawa River, Wayman grew up largely in British Columbia. A cofounder of the Vancouver Industrial Writers’ Union, he has been active in a number of labor arts ventures and is perhaps best known for his essays about contemporary work writing, including A Country Not Considered: Canada, Culture, Work, and as the editor of several anthologies of contemporary work poetry, among them Paperwork. More recently, Wayman has also delved into fiction. Two collections of his short stories are forthcoming in 2007, including Boundary Country, a joint publication of Saskatoon’s Thistledown Press and Eastern Washington University Press. He teaches at the University of Calgary, Alberta, but has been spending this semester as the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in creative writing at Arizona State University. Photo: Jeremy Addington

After graduating from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Ann Joslin Williams was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and was subsequently awarded a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship. She is the winner of the 2006 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction for The Woman in the Woods, a collection of linked stories published by Eastern Washington University Press earlier this year. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including the Iowa Review, the Missouri Review, Ploughshares, and the North American Review. A resident of San Francisco, she teaches in the MFA program in writing at the California College of the Arts. Photo: Liz Williams

John Witte’s poems have appeared widely in publications such as the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and the American Poetry Review, as well as in several anthologies, including The NortonIntroduction to Literature. He is the author of three collections, Loving the Days, The Hurtling, and the forthcoming Second Nature, and the editor of The Collected Poems of Hazel Hall. The recipient of two writing fellowships from the NEA, a residency at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and other generous support, he lives with his family in Eugene, Oregon, where he teaches in the English department at the University of Oregon and edits the Northwest Review.