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, appeared in 2007, and since then, he has published new poems in the New Yorker. 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 four anthologies which grew out of the project -- Americans’ Favorite Poems, Poems to Read, An Invitation to Poetry; his most recent anthology is Essential Pleasures: Poems to Read Aloud.

Louise Glück (poetry) is the author of twelve previous books of poetry, Firstborn, The House on Marshland, The Garden, Descending Figure, The Triumph of Achilles, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Ararat, The Wild Iris, which earned her the Pulitzer Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award, The First Four Books of Poems, Meadowlands, Vita Nova, The Seven Ages, and Averno. Her most recent collection of poems, A Village Life, is forthcoming this fall. Her poems appear widely, from the New Yorker, to Slate, and Poetry. In addition to these, she has published a book of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry. Her awards include the Bollinging Prize, the Lannan Literary Award, and she has held fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Arts. Recently she gave the Blashfield Address before the American Academy of Arts and Letters, only the sixth poet in the history of the organization to be granted that honor. In 2003, she succeeded Billy Collins as the 12th Poet Laureate of the United States.

Leslie Epstein (fiction): I've published ten 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. More recently, my stage adaptation of my novel King of the Jews has been produced both in Boston and Maryland. 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.