Russell Banks

Junot Díaz

Alexandra Fuller

Alice Fulton

Peter Kuper

Salman Rushdie

Russell Banks has made a life’s work of charting the causes and effects of the terrible things “normal” men can and will do.  A prolific writer of fiction, his titles include The Darling, The Sweet Hereafter, Cloudsplitter, Rule of the Bone, Affliction, Success Stories, Continental Drift,  Searching for Survivors, Trailerpark, The Book of Jamaica, The New World, Hamilton Stark, and The Angel on the Roof, a collection of thirty years of Banks’ short fiction.  His novels, Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter, were adapted into feature films which received widespread critical acclaim; currently, Cloudsplitter, The Darling, and Continental Drift are also in film production.  Included among the numerous honors and awards Russell Banks has received are the Ingram Merrill Award, the John Dos Passos Award, and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; he has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award.  

Photo by Ileana Florescu





Junot Díaz, born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, immigrated at age seven with his family to the United States. After the publication of Drown, his first book, Newsweek named Díaz as one of the “New Faces of 1996.” His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, Best American Short Stories (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000), and in Pushcart Prize XXII. Díaz’s much awaited second book, the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, has just been published to critical acclaim.  He has received a Eugene McDermott Award, a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, the 2002 Pen/Malamud Award, the 2003 US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.








Alexandra Fuller’s debut book Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood was a New York Times Notable Book, the Booksense Best Non-fiction book, a finalist for the Guardian’s First Book Award and the winner of the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize in 2002.  Her 2004 Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier won the Ulysses Prize for Art of Reportage.  Fuller has also written for such magazines as The New Yorker and National Geographic.  Fuller’s experience of growing up in Africa during the Rhodesian war for independence (the Fullers farmed close enough to Mozambique that they could hear the border landmines going off, and both her parents joined up to fight against the liberation army – her father as a soldier and her mother as a Police Reservist) has informed all three of her books which are, at heart, anti-war stories.  But they are also love stories: “People think the book is a love letter to Africa,” Fuller has said of her debut memoir, “but really it is a love letter to my mother – a fiercely glamorous, hard-drinking woman capable of terrifying and sometimes racist madness and equally terrifying compassion.” Photo by Peg Bonner

Alice Fulton's Felt was awarded the 2002 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress and selected by the Los Angeles Times as one of the Best Books of 2001 and as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her other books include Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems, Sensual Math, Powers of Congress, Palladium (winner of The National Poetry Series Prize), Dance Script With Electric Ballerina (winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award), and a collection of essays, Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry. She has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, The Michigan Society of Fellows, and the Fine Arts Work Center.









In 1979, Peter Kuper co-founded the political ‘zine World War 3 Illustrated and remains on its editorial board to this day.  His illustrations and comics appear regularly in Time, The New York Times, and MAD Magazine, where he has illustrated SPY vs. SPY since 1997. He has written and illustrated over twenty books, including Comic Trips, Mind's Eye, and The System, as well as the graphic novels Sticks and Stones, which won the Society of Illustrators gold medal, and Stop Forgetting To Remember, the autobiography of his alter ego Walter Kurtz. His work is collected in 2000, Speechless. Kuper has also adapted many literary works into comics, including Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and an award-winning version of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.











Salman Rushdie is one of the most successful, controversial, and celebrated authors of our time.  Rushdie is the author of such international bestsellers as Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses. The latter was deemed sacrilegious by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, who issued a fatwa against Rushdie in 1989. Despite this proclamation, and the international controversy that followed, Rushdie went on to produce some of his most compelling work, including The Moor's Last Sigh and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, while living under the constant threat of death. His most recent novel, Shalimar the Clown, was an international bestseller and a nominee for both the Man Booker Prize and the Commonwealth Writer's Prize.  Rushdie is also a prolific essayist. Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction, 1992-2002 contains many of Rushdie's most provocative articles, some of which explore his own reaction to the fatwa, as well as reactions of the media and various governments.  Rushdie is the winner of numerous literary prizes and awards, including the prestigious Man Booker Prize, and the "Booker of Bookers" Award, which was awarded to the best Booker-winning novel of the prize's first 25 years, Midnight’s Children. Rushdie is also a recipient of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, and other top international honors from Budapest, Italy, and Austria. In 2007, Rushdie was officially knighted by the Queen for services to literature.  Photo by Beowulf Sheehan - PEN American Center