September 7: George Bishop

George Bishop, Jr., graduated with degrees in English Literature and Communications from Loyola University in New Orleans before moving to Los Angeles to become an actor. After eight years of commercials, stage plays, guest starring roles in TV sitcoms, and the lead in a B-movie called Teen Vamp, he traveled overseas as a volunteer English teacher to the newly independent Czechoslovakia. Most recently he taught with a University of Montana program at Toyo University in Tokyo. His first novel, Letter to My Daughter, was published this year by Ballantine Books.

October 5: Christopher Chambers

Christopher Chambers is an Associate Professor of English at Loyola. He has written for television and film, and has published fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and book reviews in The Gettysburg Review, Ninth Letter, Quarterly West, Carolina Quarterly, Indiana Review, Exquisite Corpse, CopperNickel, Louisiana Literature, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, Georgetown Review, Notre Dame Review, Washington Square, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Lit, BOMB Magazine, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere. His work has received four Pushcart Prize nominations, and has been anthologized in French Quarter Fiction, Knoxville Bound, Maple Street Rag, and Best American Mystery Stories 2003. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for creative writing in 2008. He is editor of New Orleans Review.

November 2: Megan Burns

Megan Burns has been published in the New Laurel Review, Exquisite Corpse, YAWP Journal, and Wild Strawberries. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2004 by Slipstream Magazine. In 2004, she created and performed The Frida Show, a multimedia poetry play about the life of Frida Kahlo. Her chapbook, Hago la Forma/ I am the poem (Trembling Pillow Press, 2004) features selections from the play. Megan lives in New Orleans where she and her husband, poet Dave Brinks, run the 17 Poets! Reading series as well as Trembling Pillow Press.

December 7: Matthea Harvey

Matthea Harvey is the author of Sad Little Breathing Machine (Graywolf, 2004) and Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (Alice James Books, 2000). Her third book of poems, Modern Life (Graywolf, 2007) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Cirlcle Award and a New York Times Notable Book. Her first children’s book, The Little General and the Giant Snowflake, illustrated by Elizabeth Zechel, is forthcoming from Tin House Books. Matthea is a contributing editor to jubilat, Meatpaper and BOMB. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence and lives in Brooklyn.