Bonnie Jo Campbell's Women & Other Animals details the lives of extraordinary females in rural and small town Michigan. It won the Associated Writing Programs short fiction award, and is now out in paperback. Her story "The Smallest Man in the World" was awarded a Pushcart Prize, and her new novel Q Road has been named a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers book. The New York Times has called her stories "Bitter but sweetened by humor," and Publisher's Weekly said Campbell details, "domestic worlds where Martha Stewart would fear to tread."

Bonnie Jo Campbell grew up on a small Michigan farm, in a house her Grandfather Herlihy built in the shape of an H. She learned to castrate small pigs, milk Jersey cows, and make chocolate candy. When she left home for the University of Chicago, her mother rented out her room. She has since hitchhiked across the U.S. and Canada, scaled the Swiss Alps on her bicycle, and traveled with the circus. She has led adventure tours in Russia, the Baltics, and throughout Eastern Europe. After earning a master's degree in mathematics in 1992 she started writing fiction. She received her M.F.A. in writing from Western Michigan University, and lives in Kalamazoo.

Lundin is the author of a poetry collection, The Ginseng Hunter's Notebook (New Issues Press, 1999). Her work has also appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and other literary journals. While a Lecturer at University of Michigan, she developed an instructional Web site using the poetry archives at the Bentley Historical Library as an introduction to research in Special Collections.

Ms. Lundin recently completed an M.F.A. at the University of Michigan. Works in progress include a novella memoir about Florida and a dissertation (UCLA) on American women poets and mystical discourse. She is a winner of a 1997 Hopwood Award, and has also served as a judge for the Hopwood Awards.

Anne Harris is the author of the novels The Nature of Smoke and Accidental Creatures. Her latest, the forthcoming Inventing Memory, is a feminist romance that tackles the question, "Can women and men find happiness and liberation together?" and goes all the way to ancient Sumeria and back to find the answer.

Harris has been a long-term advocate of women's rights, reproductive freedom and GLBT rights. Accidental Creatures, won the first-ever Spectrum Award for best novel dealing with GLBT characters, themes and issues. The Nature of Smoke achieved distinction with a starred review in Publisher's Weekly and a listing in Locus Magazine's recommended reading list. Common themes in her work are chaos theory, biotechnology, personal freedom and transformation.

Harris has lived in the metro Detroit area all her life, and her first two books are set in near-future Detroit industrial dystopias. She has, at various times, worked as an operations research analyst for the Department of Defense, a vegetarian cook, a dry-cleaner, a book store clerk, a small-town reporter and a PR writer. She has a degree in computer and information science from Oakland University. Anne Harris lives in Royal Oak with her husband Steve, their dog, Rodney, and cats, Hector and Mavis.

G. Scott Huggins was born in California but was raised in Kansas. He received his B.A. from Kansas State University, and his M.A. from Michigan State University. He now lives in Michigan, where his hobbies of bookselling and cat maintenance take up the time he does not devote to writing.

Huggins attended the MSU Clarion Writers' Workshop in 1997, and won second prize in the L. Ron Hubbard Writers & Illustrators of the Future contest in Fall 1999. His works have appeared in Writers of the Future, Vol. 15, Amazing Stories, Andromeda Spaceways, and Karen Joy Fowler'sMOTA 3: Courage anthology.

Stuart Dybek is the author of two collections of short stories (The Coast of Chicago and Childhood and Other Neighborhoods) and a collection of poems (Brass Knuckles). A chapbook of short short fiction and prose poems, The Story of Mist (State Street Press) was published in 1993. His fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have been published in numerous magazines including The New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper's, DoubleTake, and Poetry. His work as also been translated into several languages, and is frequently anthologized. In Fall, 2003, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux will publish two new books:  a novel in stories and a new collection of poetry.

He has received numerous awards, including: a 1998 Lannan Award; the 1995 PEN/Bernard Malamud Prize "for distinctive achievement in the short story;" an Academy Institute Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994; a Guggenheim Fellowship; two fellowships from the NEA; a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center; and a Whiting Writers Award. He has also received four O. Henry Prizes, including an O. Henry first prize for his story, "Hot Ice." Dybek's story, "Blight," was awarded the Nelson Algren Prize and his collection, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, which was nominated for the National Book Critics' Circle Award, received the 1981 Prize for Fiction from the Society of Midland Authors and the Cliff Dwellers Award from the Friends of Literature.

Dybek earned an MFA from the University of Iowa and holds an MA in Literature from Loyola University in Chicago. Currently, he is a Professor of English at Western Michigan University and a member of the permanent faculty for the Prague Summer Writers Seminars. He is a contributing editor for several magazines and serves regularly as a judge for various literary awards.