Jocelyn Bartkevicius (Editor) is completing a memoir, The Emerald Room, on growing up in a burlesque nightclub. Her work has been published in anthologies and such journals as The Hudson Review, The Missouri Review, The Bellingham Review, and Fourth Genre, and has received The Annie Dillard Award in the Essay, The Missouri Review Prize, and the Iowa Woman Essay Award. She is the editor of The Florida Review and directs the MFA program at the University of Central Florida.  For more information on Bartkevicius, visit http://www.flreview.com

Eve Bridburg (Literary Agent) joined Zachary, Shuster and Harmsworth as an agent in the fall of 2005.  After graduating with a Masters in Creative Writing from Boston University, where she studied with Margot Livesey, Leslie Epstein, and Ralph Lombreglia on a teaching fellowship, Eve founded Grub Street, Inc., now recognized as the leading literary arts center in New England.  At Grub Street, Eve taught fiction workshops, nurtured local talent, developed avenues for networking and professional development and celebrated new works of fiction and nonfiction.  Eve continues to contribute to Grub Street’s growth and development as an active member of the Board of Directors.
As an agent, Eve represents both fiction and nonfiction.  She is actively seeking new works of literary and up-market fiction, YA fiction, memoir, and creative nonfiction.  She is also interested in nonfiction of all stripes, but is particularly moved by history, politics, motherhood, and health and wellness.
Eve’s most recent sales include: “Odd Boys Out: Protecting our Youngest Boys from Today’s Climate of Unfair Expectations, High Demands, Quick Diagnoses and Pills” by Dr. Anthony Rao and Michelle Seaton to Harpercollins in a pre-empt; “Joker One: One Platoon’s Courage, Heartache and Sacrifice on the Front Lines in Iraq” by Marine Captain Donovan Campbell to Random House at auction; and “The N.E.A.T Life” by world-renowned Obesity expert Jim Levine and writer Selene Yeager to Crown in a pre-empt.  Eve’s first project “Doctor Olaf Van Schuler’s Brain,” a brilliant and entirely original short story collection by Kirsten Menger Anderson (Algonguin 2009) will be on the shelves this fall. For more info about Eve and her agency, visit http://www.zshliterary.com/

Jim Brock (Poet). Jim Brock's fourth book of poetry, Gods & Money, will be published by WordTech Editions in 2010.  He is also author of Pictures That Got Small (2005), Nearly Florida (2000), and The Sunshine Mine Disaster (1995).  For his poetry, he has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alex Haley Foundation, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the Idaho Commission for the Arts.  Before being able to leave his native Idaho, he worked as a produce clerk, a mobile home roofer, and a field researcher of black bears.  He currently chairs the Department of Language and Literature at Florida Gulf Coast University.  He lives in Fort Myers, where he enjoys birding, dance, frippery, and really bad movies.  Additional tid-bits about Jim can be found at his blog:  www.PicturesThatGotSmall.blogspot.com

Ron Carlson (Young Adult Fiction) is the author of four novels: Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1977), Truants (1981), The Speed of Light (2003), and most recently Five Skies (Viking, 2007). He has penned four extremely well-regarded short story collections: The News of the World (1987), Plan B for the Middle Class (1992; a New York Times Best Book that year), The Hotel Eden (1997; a NYT Notable Book), At the Jim Bridger (2002; a Los Angeles Times 2002 Best Book). A Kind of Flying (2003) is a compilation of selected stories from his first three collections. He has also written a book about writing called Ron Carlson Writes a Story: From the First Glimmer of an Idea to the Final Sentence (2007).

His short stories originally appeared in many of the best-known magazines, such as The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, Gentlemen's Quarterly, and Playboy. They have also appeared in various anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, Sudden Fiction, Best of the West Epoch, In Our Lovely Deseret: Mormon Fictions, The North American Review, The O'Henry Prize Series, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.

In addition to his fiction, Carlson's writing has also appeared in The New York Times Book Review and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. He has also received a number of honors and awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, a National Society of Arts and Letters Literature Award, and the 1993 Ploughshares Cohen Prize. He is the Director of the Graduate Program in Fiction at UC Irvine.

Camille Cline (Editor) opened The Literary Spa® (www.literaryspa.com) in 2001 to help fiction and nonfiction authors to develop their works for submission to literary agents and publishers, via substantive editing, revising, and polishing.  Cline understands authors’ challenges and has developed a gentle method for editing powerful books.
        Cline has served as Editor-in-Chief at LifeCast; senior acquisitions editor at Taylor Trade Publishing and Cader Books, where she also served as Executive Editor of the People Entertainment Almanac; and as associate editor at Tor/Forge Books, a division of St. Martin’s Press.  She started her career in New York as a researcher/reviewer at PC Magazine, after completing the Radcliffe Publishing Course in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  In 2007, Cline moved with her daughter and son to Venice, Florida, to be closer to family.

John Dufresne (Fiction) grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he wasted his youth playing baseball and going to movies. He attended Worcester State College and spent seven years as a social worker before attending the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Arkansas. Dufresne is the author of the story collections The Way That Water Enters Stone (1991) and Johnny Too Bad (2006). His novel Louisiana Power & Light (1994) was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. It was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, as was his second novel, Love Warps the Mind a Little (1997). In describing Deep in the Shade of Paradise (2002), Publishers Weekly wrote, “Imagining John Irving, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor or Max Shulman (or all of the above at once) on peyote juice only begins to evoke the dimension and energy of the seriocomic fantasies of Dufresne at his freewheeling, frenetic best.” In July 2008, W.W. Norton, Dufresne’s longtime publisher, will release his most recent novel, Requiem, Mass. In addition to his works of fiction, he has a book on fiction writing titled The Lie That Tells a Truth.  Carl Hiassen chose Dufresne’s story “The Timing of Unfelt Smiles” for inclusion in Best American Mystery Stories 2007.   In April 2008, Grand Valley Productions filmed To Live and Die in Dixie, based on a screenplay Dufresne co-wrote with Donald Papy. Since 1989 he has been teaching in the Creative Writing Program at Florida International University (http://w3.fiu.edu/crwriting/). He lives in Dania Beach, Florida, with his wife and son.  For more information on John Dufresne, visit www.johndufresne.com.

Beth Ann Fennelly (Poetry) received a 2003 National Endowment for the Arts Award and a 2006 United States Artist grant. She's written two books of poetry, Open House, which won The 2001 Kenyon Review Prize and the GLCA New Writers Award, and Tender Hooks (W. W. Norton, 2004), as well as a book of essays, Great With Child (W. W. Norton, 2006). Her third book of poems, Unmentionables, is forthcoming in 2008. She has three times been included in The Best American Poetry Series and is a Pushcart Prize winner. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Mississippi. www.unitedstatesartists.org/Public/Interviews/2007/BethAnnFennelly/index.cfm
www.wwnorton.com/catalog/spring08/006605.htm

William Giraldi (Writing About Grief) teaches in the Writing Program at Boston University and is senior fiction editor for the journal AGNI. His stories and essays have appeared recently in Tin House, Antioch Review, The Believer, Shenandoah, Massachusetts Review, Missouri Review, Georgia Review, The New Criterion, Southern Review, and Poets & Writers. New essays are forthcoming in Kenyon Review and TriQuarterly, and he is a regular book critic for The Common Review. For more information on William Giraldi and AGNI, visit: http://www.bu.edu/agni/about/staff/bio-giraldi.html

Stephanie Elizondo Griest (Memoir) has mingled with the Russian Mafiya, polished Chinese propaganda, and belly danced with Cuban rumba queens. These adventures inspired her award-winning memoir Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana (Villard/Random House, 2004) and guidebook 100 Places Every Woman Should Go (Travelers’ Tales, 2007). Atria/Simon & Schuster published her memoir Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines in 2008. She has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Latina Magazine, and the Associated Press, and once drove 45,000 miles across America in a Honda Hatchback named Bertha as a National Correspondent for The Odyssey: US Trek. A 2005-2006 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, she lectures and performs nationwide, and recently won the Richard J. Margolis Award for social justice reporting. Visit her website at www.aroundthebloc.com

John McNally (Screenwriting) is the author of two novels, The Book of Ralph and America’s Report Card, and two short story collections, Troublemakers and Ghosts of Chicago.  He's also edited six anthologies, most recently Who Can Save Us Now?: Brand-New Superheroes and Their amazing Stories (co-edited with Owen King).  He has been the recipient of numerous writing awards, including a screenwriting fellowship from the Chesterfield Writer's Film Project, sponsored by Paramount Pictures.  His screenplays have been optioned by Paramount Pictures and Santa Monica Film Arts.  His novel, The Book of Ralph, has been optioned for film.  A native of Chicago, he is an Associate Professor of English at Wake Forest University.  His website is www.bookofralph.com.

Leonard Nash (Fiction) received a Florida Book Award Silver Medal for his debut collection, You Can’t Get There from Here and Other Stories (Kitsune Books, 2007). Born in Miami Beach, Nash holds an M.F.A. from Florida International University. His work has appeared in the Seattle Review, South Dakota Review, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Sunshine Magazine, Potpourri, Gulf Stream Magazine, Miami Magazine, and elsewhere. Based in Hollywood, Florida, Nash is a freelance writing and editing consultant, mortgage broker, and Realtor. He has taught creative writing at Florida International University and the Florida Center for the Literary Arts at Miami Dade College. For more on Leonard Nash, visit www.leonardnash.com.

John K. Samson (Songwriting) is a singer, songwriter, poet, and publisher. As the singer/songwriter for indie-rock band The Weakerthans, John has written and released four full-length albums, the most recent of which is Reunion Tour (Epitaph/Anti, 2007), and toured extensively in North America and Europe. In 1997 John co-founded Arbeiter Ring Publishing, a small publishing house, and is currently its Managing Editor. His poetry and prose has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, and he has guest lectured at several Canadian universities. John K. Samson lives in Winnipeg, Canada, with his wife, composer Christine Fellows, and their dogs Lefty and Loosey.  For more about Samson, The Weakerthans and Arbeiter Ring Publishing, go to www.theweakerthans.org or www.arbeiterring.com.

Christopher Schelling (Literary Agent) of Ralph M. Vicinanza Ltd., represents a wide-ranging list of fiction and nonfiction authors.  In his eleven years at the agency, he has represented #1 New York Times bestselling writers Augusten Burroughs (Running With Scissors) and Haven Kimmel (A Girl Named Zippy), as well as highly respected literary fiction (Louis Bayard's The Black Tower) and upscale nonfiction (Hanne Blank's Virgin: The Untouched History).  His specialty in memoir has also brought writers like Robert Wilder (Daddy Needs a Drink) and John Elder Robison (Look Me in the Eye) to his list.  In addition, he represents a number of young adult authors, including Kathe Koja (Buddha Boy), Cinda Williams Chima (The Warrior Heir) and Eric A. Kimmel, author of over 80 picture books. Previous to being an agent, he held Executive Editor positions at both Dutton and HarperCollins.