Derek Walcott (poetry and playwriting): His plays and books include the Obie award-winning Dream on Monkey Mountain, The Joker of Seville, O Babylon!, The Star-Apple Kingdom, The Fortunate Traveller, and Collected Poems, 1948-1984, The Arkansas Testament, Omeros, The Bounty, What The Twilight Says: essays, Tiepolo’s Hound, The Haitian Trilogy, Walker and the Ghost Dance, and, most recently, The Prodigal.   Among Derek's awards: a MacArthur Foundation Grant, the most highly prized and the richest such grant in the country, and of course the Nobel Prize.

Robert Pinsky, critic and poet, has held the Stegner fellowship at Stanford and served as Poetry Editor of The New Republic (1978-1987).  His books of poems are Sadness and Happiness, Explanation of America, The Want Bone, History of My Heart (which was awarded the William Carlos Williams Prize of The Poetry Society of America), and Jersey Rain. He is also co-translator of poems by Czeslaw Milosz and an acclaimed translator of Dante's Inferno.  His books on contemporary poetry are The Situation of Poetry, and Poetry and the World.  The Figured Wheel, his book of new and collected poems, (nominated for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and awarded Ambassador Book Award in Poetry of the English Speaking Union), was published in 1996.  The Sounds of Poetry and The Handbook of Heartbreak were published in 1998, followed by Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry in 2002. His latest book of poetry, Gulf Music, is due out in 2007. His latest prose work was Life of David. Robert was named Poet Laureate of the United States from 1997 to 2001, and in this position he founded the Favorite Poem Project.  He has edited three anthologies which grew out of the project -- Americans’ Favorite Poems, Poems to Read, and An Invitation to Poetry.

Leslie Epstein (fiction):  I've published nine books of fiction: P.D. Kimerakov  (novel), The Steinway Quintet Plus Four (stories), King of the Jews (novel), Regina (novel), Goldkorn Tales (novellas), the novels Pinto & Sons, Pandaemonium, Ice Fire Water (a novel in the form of three novellas, and San Remo Drive: a Novel from Memory. My most recent novel is The Eighth Wonder of the World. I've held a Rhodes Scholarship, Guggenheim Fellowship, had a couple of National Endowment for the Arts Grants, as well as one from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and an award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. I’ve also held a residency from the Rockefeller Foundation at Bellagio.