Franklin & Marshall College

Megan Mayhew Bergman was raised in North Carolina and now lives on a small farm in Shaftsbury, Vermont with her veterinarian husband, two daughters, and lots of animals.  Her first collection of short stories, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, was published with Scribner in March 2012.  Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has been published in The New York Times, Best American Short Stories 2011, New Stories from the South 2010, Ploughshares, Oxford American, Kenyon Review, One Story, Narrative, and elsewhere.  Megan read prose for the New England Review, attended Breadloaf as a fiction scholar, and was a fellow at the Millay Colony for the Arts.  She teaches literature at Bennington College.

Christine Hemp has been called a “poetry adventurer.” She has aired her essays and poems on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition; she has sent a poem of hers into space on a NASA mission to monitor the birth of stars; and her program Connecting Chord, which unites cops and youth offenders through poetry, was called a “milestone event” by the London, U.K. Chief of Police. Her awards include a Harvard University Conway Award for Teaching Writing, a Washington State Artist Trust Fellowship for Literature, and an Iowa Review Award for nonfiction. Her collection of poems, That Fall, was selected for the 2011 New Women’s Voices series at Finishing Line Press. Hemp teaches poetry and creative nonfiction at the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival. She also writes, produces, and hosts a program on 91.9 KPTZ public radio called The Hempsonian Institute of Higher Yearning.    She lives in Port Townsend, Washington.                             www.christinehemp.com

Rebecca Makkai is a Chicago-based writer whose first novel, The Borrower (Viking, June 2011), is a Booklist Top Ten Debut, an Indie Next pick, an O Magazine selection and one of Chicago Magazine's choices for best fiction of 2011. The New York Times called The Borrower “an appealing, nonromantic love story about an unexpected pairing — and a surprisingly moving one,” and London’s Daily Mail called it an “astonishingly assured novel.”

Her short fiction has been chosen for The Best American Short Stories in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011, and appears regularly in journals such as Tin House, Ploughshares, New England Review and Shenandoah. She has just completed a short story collection, Music for Wartime, and is at work on her second novel. She has two young daughters.

Jamaal May is a Cave Canem Fellow, Callaloo Fellow and graduate from Warren Wilson’s MFA for writers. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks (The God Engine, 2009 and The Whetting of Teeth, 2012) and editor of the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Series. His work appears in Callaloo, Indiana Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Sou’western, Blackbird and Verse Daily among other journals, magazines, and anthologies. He has appeared on radio, television, and in documentaries such as “A Poet in Every Classroom” and “Televising a Revolution,” jury prize winner at the 2010 Trinity Film Festival.

May has received two scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, two Pushcart Prize nominations, an International Publication Prize from Atlanta Review, and he was a finalist for the 2010 and 2011 Ruth Lilly Fellowships. Currently, he is the 2011-2013 Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University where he hosts a poetry slam, acts as associate editor for the lit journal West Branch, and fusses over his first full-length manuscript, which was a finalist for The National Poetry Series as well as the Levis Prize from Four Way Books. 

Remaining active in the poetry slam community, May is a three-time Rustbelt Regional Poetry Slam Champion, two-time Detroit Slam Champion, and two-time Individual World Poetry Slam finalist finishing as high as second place. He has coached three Brave New Voices youth slam teams, taught poetry classes through the Inside Out Literary Arts Project, and given readings, lectures and workshops at schools, bars, libraries, and living rooms across the United States and Canada. 

Anna Moench's plays include Hunger, In Quietness (Ensemble Studio Theatre), Great Eastern ([the claque] Fall 2012), and The Pillow Book (59E59).  Other productions of her work have been seen at the Old Vic, The Flea, Dance Theater Workshop, Dixon Place, The Kraine, The Looking Glass Theatre, and FringeNYC.  Anna has developed plays with The Public Theater, the Lark, [the claque], 3Graces Theater Co., the Great Plains Conference, the Last Frontier Conference, The Inkwell, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, where she was named a Tennessee Williams Scholar .

Awards include the 2012 Van Lier Fellowship at the Lark Play Development Center, the Jerome Foundation’s 2009 Travel Grant and the 2010 T.S. Eliot Exchange with the Old Vic. Anna is a two-time recipient of the EST/Sloan Commission and has also been commissioned by Red Fern Theatre Company and Haggard Middle School in Plano, TX.  She has been a writer in residence at the Tofte Lake Center, the Vineyard Arts Project, and the FAR Space.

Anna is a current member of Youngblood at Ensemble Studio Theatre and a former member of the 2011 Emerging Writers Group at The Public Theater and New Georges’ writer-director lab, The Jam.  She is currently working on a commission for NYU Tisch with director David Frederic Chapman, and is Head Writer of [the claque]’s upcoming serial theater project, Welcome to SAPRHON! (It’s Only Temporary).  Her play for young actors, Backwards At The Speed Of Light, is being published by Playscripts.  B.A. Wesleyan University