| JOHN BIGUENET is the author of Oyster, a novel, and The Torturer's Apprentice: Stories, among other books. Biguenet’s plays include Wundmale, The Vulgar Soul, and Rising Water (the winner of the National New Play Network Commission Award among its many honors). He was awarded a 2007 Marquette Fellowship for the writing of his next play, Night Train, which he then developed on a Studio Attachment at the National Theatre in London. Two of his stories have been featured in Selected Shorts at Symphony Space on Broadway. His work has received an O. Henry Award and a Harper's Magazine Writing Award among other distinctions. He is currently the Robert Hunter Distinguished Professor at Loyola University in New Orleans. Named its first guest columnist by The New York Times, Biguenet chronicled in both columns and videos his return to New Orleans after its catastrophic flooding and the efforts to rebuild the city. NY Times Column | Theater Slideshow at NOLA.com
|  | JOHN GERY’s poetry, criticism, and reviews have appeared throughout the United States and Europe, including in Callaloo, the Iowa Review, New Orleans Review, Paideuma, Prairie Schooner, and West Branch. He has also been a collaborative translator of works in serbian, armenian, chinese, and french. A research professor of english at the University of New Orleans, he directs the Ezra Pound Center for Literature, Brunnenburg, Italy. He was a research fellow at the University of Minnesota and a Fulbright fellow at the University of Belgrade. Among Gery’s books of poetry are Charlemagne: A Song of Gestures, The Enemies of Leisure, American Ghost: Selected Poems (English-Serbian, translated by Biljana Obradovic), Davenport’s Version, and A Gallery of Ghosts. He lives in New Orleans with his wife, poet Biljana Obradovic, and their son Petar. | 
| CAROLYN HEMBREE was born and raised in Bristol, Tennessee. Before earning an MFA from the University of Arizona, she found employment as a cashier, housecleaner, cosmetics consultant, telecommunicator, actor, receptionist, paralegal, coder, and freelance writer. She has poems out or forthcoming in Colorado Review, The Cream City Review, CutBank, Faultline, Forklift, Ohio, Indiana Review, Jubilat, New Orleans Review, Puerto del Sol, and StorySouth. Her poetry has been anthologized in Intersection, Lush: A Poetry Anthology & Cocktail Guide, and Poetry Daily. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Carolyn received a 2005 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Louisiana Division of the Arts. Carolyn teaches composition and creative writing at the University of New Orleans. |  | BILJANA D. OBRADOVIC, a Serbian-American poet, translator, and critic has lived in Greece, India, and the United States. She is associate professor of english at Xavier University of Louisiana, in New Orleans. She has two collections of poems, Frozen Embraces and Le Riche Monde. Her poems also appear in Three Poets in New Orleans and in anthologies and magazines, such as Like Thunder: Poets Respond in Violence in America, Key West: A Collection, Poetry East, Bloomsbury Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Plum Review. In addition to her own poetry, other works include her Serbian translation of John Gery's American Ghosts: Selected Poems, Stanley Kunitz's The Long Boat, Fives: Fifty Poems by Serbian and American Poets, A Bilingual Anthology, and a collection of Bratislav Milanovic's poems in The Unnecessary Chronicle. She also reviews books for World Literature Today and others.
|  | MONA LISA SALOY, author and folklorist, is associate professor of english and director of the creative writing program at Dillard University. Mona Lisa’s first collection of verse, Red Beans and Ricely Yours: Poems, won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Prize in 2006 and the T. S. Eliot Prize in poetry for 2005, published by Truman State University Press; also, this collection was a finalist for the Morgan Prize from StoryLine Press. In October 2006, the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia commissioned Mona Lisa Saloy to compose and perform a poem entitled We celebrating 2006 Liberty Medal recipients and former presidents William J. Clinton and George H.W. Bush. Dr. Saloy also published a chapter in the collection of essays edited by David Starkey entitled Living Blue in the Red States from University of Nebraska Press. She is listed in the Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers, published by Greenwood Press and edited by Yolanda W. Page in 2007.
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