2009 Living Writers (Video-Large)

Kim Edwards has won numerous awards, including a Whiting Award and the Nelson Algren Award and most recently the Kentucky Literary Award for fiction. She is the author of a collection of short stories, THE SECRETS OF A FIRE KING, which was an alternate for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Zoetrope, Anteaus, Story, and The Paris Review and have received a National Magazine Awards for excellence in Fiction and a Pushcart Prize. A graduate of the Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, she currently teaches writing at the University of Kentucky. This is her first novel, which has been chosen as a Barnes and Noble Discover title. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky with her husband and daughters.

Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing, China and moved to the United States in 1996. Her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She has received a Whiting Writers' Award and was awarded a Lannan Foundation residency. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/ Hemingway Award, and Guardian First Book Award. She was selected as one of Granta's 21 Best of Young American Novelists. Her novel, The Vagrants, was published in February, 2009.

Elizabeth Strout’s most recent work, Olive Kitteridge, a novel in stories, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was a New York Times Bestseller. She is the author of two previous novels, Abide With Me, a national bestseller, and Amy and Isabelle, also a New York Times Bestseller, which won the L.A. Times Award for First Fiction, The Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize, and was short-listed for The PEN/Faulkner Award, as well as The Orange Prize in England. Her stories have appeared in a number of magazines, including The New Yorker,”O,” and also in Best American Mystery Stories. She is on the faculty of the low-residency MFA Program at Queens College in Charlotte, North Carolina, and makes her home in New York City.

Elizabeth Strout’s most recent work, Olive Kitteridge, a novel in stories, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was a New York Times Bestseller. She is the author of two previous novels, Abide With Me, a national bestseller, and Amy and Isabelle, also a New York Times Bestseller, which won the L.A. Times Award for First Fiction, The Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize, and was short-listed for The PEN/Faulkner Award, as well as The Orange Prize in England. Her stories have appeared in a number of magazines, including The New Yorker,”O,” and also in Best American Mystery Stories. She is on the faculty of the low-residency MFA Program at Queens College in Charlotte, North Carolina, and makes her home in New York City.

Ladette Randolph is editor-in-chief of Ploughshares magazine and a professor at Emerson College. She is the author of the novel A Sandhills Ballad and the award-winning short story collection This Is Not the Tropics, as well as the editor of two anthologies: The Big Empty and A Different Plain. She has been the recipient of a grant from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, as well as a Pushcart Prize, a Virginian Faulkner Award, and three Nebraska Book Awards. Her work has been reprinted in Best New American Voices.

Carrie Brown is the author of five novels and a collection of short stories. She has won many awards for her work, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. She lives in Virginia with her husband, the novelist John Gregory Brown, and their three children. She teaches at Sweet Briar College. Born and raised in New Orleans, John Gregory Brown is the author of the novels Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery (1994), The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur (1996), and Audubon’ s Watch (2001). His honors include a Lyndhurst Prize, the 1994 Lillian Smith Award, the 1996 Steinbeck Award, and the 2002 Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year Award. He is the Julia Jackson Nichols Professor of English at Sweet Briar College and lives in Virginia with his wife, the novelist Carrie Brown, and their three children.