Gerald Stern was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1925 and was educated at the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University.  He is the author of 16 books of poetry, including, most recently, Divine Nothingness (Norton, 2014) and In Beauty Bright (Norton, 2012), as well as This Time:  New and Selected Poems, which won the 1998 National Book Award and a kind-of memoir of a year in 85 sections titled Stealing History, was published by Trinity University Press in the spring of 2012.  Stern was awarded the 2005 Wallace Stevens Award by the Academy of American Poets, was the 2010 recipient of the Medal of Honor in Poetry by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he was inducted into the 2012 class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was the 2012 recipient of the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress.  He was the 2014 winner of the Frost Medal. Stern has two books coming out in 2017, a poetry collection from W. W. Norton called Galaxy Love and a book of non-fiction titled Deathwatch, to be released by Trinity University Press.

Liz Moore is a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction.
Her first novel, The Words of Every Song (Broadway Books, 2007), centers on a fictional record company in New York City just after the turn of the millennium. It draws partly on Liz’s own experiences as a musician. It was selected for Borders’ Original Voices program and was given a starred review by Kirkus.Roddy Doyle wrote of it, “This is a remarkable novel, elegant, wise, and beautifully constructed. I loved the book.”

After the publication of her debut novel, Liz obtained her MFA in Fiction from Hunter College. In 2009, she was awarded the University of Pennsylvania’s ArtsEdge residency and moved to Philadelphia, where she still lives. She is now an Assistant Professor of Writing at Holy Family University.

Her second novel, Heft, was published by W.W. Norton in January 2012 to popular and critical acclaim. Of Heft, The New Yorker wrote, “Moore’s characters are lovingly drawn…a truly original voice”; The San Francisco Chronicle wrote, “Few novelists of recent memory have put our bleak isolation into words as clearly as Liz Moore does in her new novel”; and editor Sara Nelson wrote in O, The Oprah Magazine, “Beautiful…Stunningly sad and heroically hopeful.” The novel was published in five countries, was long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and was included on several “Best of 2012” lists, including those of NPR and the Apple iBookstore.

Moore’s short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in venues such as Tin House, The New York Times, and Narrative Magazine. She is the winner of the Medici Book Club Prize and Philadelphia’s Athenaeum Literary Award. After winning a 2014 Rome Prize in Literature, she spent 2014-15 at the American Academy in Rome, completing her third novel.

That novel, The Unseen World, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. in July 2016.

Colm Toibin is the author of eight novels, including ‘The Master’ and ‘Brooklyn’, and two collections of stories. His play ‘The Testament of Mary’ was nominated for a Tony Award for best play in 2013. He is Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University.