She lives in Iowa City and is currently finishing a novel.

Publishers Weekly calls it a “gripping, well-crafted debut tracks the awakening of a Saudi Arabian family to the dangers that lurk within.”

Scott Spencer says that Parssinen “uses her first-hand knowledge of the cross-roads where U.S. and Saudi Arabian economic and political interests intersect, and sometimes collide, and she directs the human and historical traffic with a maestro’s sense of pace, and a true storyteller’s sense of consequence.”

She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, where she received a Truman Capote fellowship, a Teaching and Writing fellowship, and was the student editor for the Iowa Short Fiction contest. After finishing the program, she received a Michener-Copernicus award for the “The Ruins of Us.”

Keija lives in Columbia, Missouri, where she is the director of the Quarry Heights Writers’ Workshop, a community for Columbia’s creative writers.

Visit her online at www.keijaparssinen.com.

Colum McCann called “Heft” a “suspenseful, restorative novel from one of our fine young voices.” Roddy Doyle called “The Words of Every Song” a “remarkable novel, elegant, wise, and beautifully constructed.”

Her work has also appeared in Narrative and the Tottenville Review.

Liz  is also a musician, and her album “Backyards” is available on iTunes and can be heard here.

Liz earned her MFA in fiction from Hunter College. She has taught creative writing at Hunter College and the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently an assistant professor of writing at Holy Family University in Philadelphia, where she lives.

Visit her online at www.lizmoore.net.

“This debut is richly rewarding and will linger for its subtle examination of human behavior and emotions — love, trust, guilt and forgiveness. A smashing debut,” raved Kirkus, in a starred review.

Her work has appeared in Best New American Voices, Open City, The New York Times and other publications.

Erin received her MFA from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow in Fiction, and currently teaches at the University of Montana.

Her nonfiction has appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle and The Bloomsbury Review.

Andrea serves as the program director for Lighthouse Writers Workshop, which she co-founded in 1997 with Michael J. Henry. Her  She received a 2011 MacDowell Fellowship, which she used to work on a novel.

She received her MFA in creative writing at Emerson College in Boston, and her B.A. in English and political science at the University of California.

She’s currently on the part-time faculty at the University of Denver’s University College.

Robert Goolrick said that “if Willa Cather and Gabriel Garcia Marquez had collaborated on a book, ‘The Snow Child’ would be it. It is a remarkable accomplishment — a combination of the most delicate, ethereal, fairytale magic and the harsh realities of homesteading in the Alaskan wilderness in 1918. Stunningly conceived, beautifully told, this story has the intricate fragility of a snowflake and the natural honesty of the dirt beneath your feet, the unnerving reality of a dream in the night.”

It is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection for 2012, and The Christian Science Monitor named it one of six must-read books for 2012. Eowyn works part-time as a bookseller at Fireside Books in Palmer, Alaska.

She grew up in Alaska and continues to live there with her husband and two daughters.

Visit her online at www.eowynivey.com.

His acclaimed play “RUST,” based on the closing of a General Motors plant in Michigan, explores what happens to the workers when companies stop making products here.

With Christine Vachon, he was an author of “A Killer Life: How an Independent Film Producer Survives Deals and Disasters in Hollywood and Beyond.”

His non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Salon, Slate, the Village Voice, New York magazine and many other publications, and been anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, Best American Fantasy, and From Boys to Men: Gay Men Write About Growing Up.

Austin is an assistant professor of writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.

He is a graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writers Workshop, and a former Axton Fellow in fiction at the University of Louisville.

Visit him online at www.austinbunn.com.

“Imagine a 21st century version of suburban scribe John Cheever writing brilliantly under the influence of hallucinogens,” raved USA Today.

Dave Eggers called Boudinot “some kind of new and dangerous cross between Vonnegut and Barthelme.” Aimee Bender said that he has “a hell of an ear: for dialogue, for the right adverb in the perfect spot, for the joy of weird slang and for the rumbling underbelly of corporate culture.”

His stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, BlackBook, Nerve and the 2003 and 2005 editions of “The Best American Nonrequired Reading.”

He lives in Seattle.

His fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, PEN/O Henry Prize Stories, The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, The Missouri Review, One Story, Commentary, The Southern Review and The Sun.

A long time writer and editor for The Nation, TIME and Sports Illustrated, he was the editor of TIME Asia and was among the founding editors of Sports Illustrated China.

He has also written multiple times for The New York Times, GQ, Vogue, Condé Nast Traveler, Wired, Playboy, Bloomberg Businessweek, Details, Men’s Journal, The Washington Post, Outside, Condé Nast Portfolio and Salon.

His writing has been selected for Best American Sports Writing, Best American Travel Writing, Best American Nonrequired Reading and Best Creative Nonfiction and translated into nine languages.

Karl was born in Kobe, Japan, has lived in Paris, New York, Hong Kong and Tokyo and currently lives in Pacific Palisades, Calif., with his wife, Silka, and two daughters, Esmee and Lola.

Visit him online at www.karltarogreenfeld.com.

She co-founded and currently edits Route 9, the journal of the MFA for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is a Juniper Fellow and assistant director of the Juniper Literary Festival.

She is writing a novel. Visit her online at sarahwrotethat.com.