Network Conferences

Fall Conference 2006 was held in Durham, NC, at the Sheraton Imperial Hotel. The conference is over, but we have left this conference information on the site so that you can refer to it as a model of what our Fall Conference is like.

Faculty Biographies: Fall Conference 2006

Chuck Adams has worked in publishing for more than thirty years, primarily at Dell/Delacorte and Simon & Schuster. Currently at Algonquin Books, he has edited a range of both fiction and nonfiction, with an emphasis on commercial titles (but no category fiction and no self-help). Recent Algonquin titles include Water for Elephants by Sarah Gruen, Golfing with God by Roland Merullo, and Tab Hunter Confidential by Tab Hunter with Eddie Muller.

Betty Adcock is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes. She won the Poet's Prize for her book Intervale, and she was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. She received a Fellowship in Poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 2002. Intervale was named "Distinguished Volume of Poetry Published in 2001" by the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook. In 1996, she received the North Carolina Governor's Award.

Anjail Rashida Ahmad, Ph.D., directs the Creative Writing Program at NC A & T, where she is also a writing instructor. She has published two collections of poems, The Color of Memory and Necessary Kindling, which was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award sponsored by Binghamton University. Her poems have also appeared in journals such as The African American Review, The Black Scholar, and The Washington Square Review. She is the recipient of many awards, including the Margaret Walker Alexander Award for Poetry from the College Language Association, two Jane Preston Prizes for Poetry from the Academy of American Poets, the Robert Frost Prize in Poetry, and the Southern Literary Festival Prize for Poetry. Ahmad has served as a judge for both the Writers Festival Prize for Poetry and Fiction sponsored by Agnes Scott College and the Preston Prize sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. She has presented workshops at colleges and universities such as Agnes Scott College, Moberly Area Community College, the University of Missouri-Columbia, and the University of North Carolina-Asheville.

Bill Arnold is a native of Greenville, North Carolina, and is a graduate of East Carolina University. He served in the Office of the Chief of Staff of The Army in the Pentagon and was a reporter and editor at his hometown newspaper in Greenville, at The Alexandria, Va. Gazette, and at The Richmond, Va. News-Leader. He became Assistant Director of the Virginia State Travel Office, where he was instrumental in implementing the successful "Virginia Is For Lovers" campaign, before becoming Director of the North Carolina Office of Travel and Tourism in 1975. Governor Jim Hunt tapped him to create the North Carolina Film Office in 1980, a post he has held ever since. Under his direction, North Carolina has ranked the No. 3 filmmaking state in the nation for 21 of the past 26 years, bringing more than 800 feature films, 14 network and cable television series, and more than $6 billion in direct revenues to the state in production spending.

Darnell Arnoult is the author of the novel Sufficient Grace (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, June 2006) and What Travels With Us: Poems (LSU Press, October 2005), winner of the Weatherford Award and winner of the 2006 SIBA Poetry Book of the Year Award. Her work has appeared in journals including Southern Cultures, Southwest Review, and Asheville Poetry Review. She holds a BA from UNC-Chapel Hill and an MA in English and Creative Writing from NC State University. She lives in Brush Creek, Tennessee, where she is at work on her second novel. For more information, visit her website at www.darnellarnoult.com.

John Balaban is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose, including four volumes that together have won The Academy of American Poets' Lamont prize, a National Poetry Series Selection, and two nominations for the National Book Award. His Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems won the 1998 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. In 2003, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2005, he was a judge for the National Book Awards. His latest book of poetry is Path, Crooked Path, published by Copper Canyon Press (March, 2006). For more information, see his website: www.johnbalaban.com.

Gerald Barrax is the author of five collections of poetry and Emeritus Professor of English at North Carolina State University. Though retired, he continues to teach in the MFA program at NCSU. He was born in Alabama, grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and lived there for almost thirty years before moving to North Carolina in 1969. His most recent book is From a Person Sitting in Darkness: New and Selected Poems from Louisiana State University.

Joseph Bathanti teaches at Appalachian State University. He is the author of four books of poetry, the last of which, This Metal, was nominated for the National Book Award and won the Oscar Arnold Young Award for the best book of poetry by a North Carolina poet. His first novel, East Liberty, won the 2001 Carolina Novel Award. His second novel, Coventry, won the 2006 Novello Literary Award. He is the recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Literature Fellowship, the Linda Flowers Prize awarded annually by the North Carolina Humanities Council, and the Sherwood Anderson Award.

Kathryn Stripling Byer grew up in southwest Georgia, graduated from Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, and earned her Master of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she studied with Allen Tate, Fred Chappell, and Robert Watson. Her books of poetry include Catching Light (Louisiana State University Press, 2002); Black Shawl (1998); Wildwood Flower (1992), which was the 1992 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets; and The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest (1986), which was published in the Associated Writing Programs award series. Byer's poems have appeared in Arts Journal, Carolina Quarterly, Georgia Review, Hudson Review, Iowa Review, Nimrod, Poetry, and Southern Review, as well as in numerous anthologies. Kathryn Stripling Byer has received writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. She is currently Poet Laureate of North Carolina.

Diane Chamberlain is the author of sixteen novels. Her complex, emotionally stirring stories focus on family relationships. She has a master's degree in social work from San Diego State University and has worked in hospitals and in private practice. Her background in psychology influences the techniques she uses to develop characters, which is her favorite aspect of writing fiction. Diane grew up in New Jersey and lived in San Diego and Northern Virginia before recently settling in Raleigh. A frequent speaker at writing workshops and community events, Diane is at work on her next novel and a memoir.

Fred Chappell is an author and poet who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Chappell was the Poet Laureate of North Carolina from 1997 to 2002. He attended Duke University. He has written thirty books in forty years, work that has been honored with dozens of prizes, including the Prix de Meilleur des Livres Etrangers from the Academie Francaise (1972), the Bollingen Prize in Poetry from Yale University (1985), and the Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry, which he won eight times between 1972 and 2003. Upon his appointment as Poet Laureate in 1997, Chappell commented, "writing is a lonely vocation, but just now I feel part of a large but closely knit family, whose roots reach back to our earliest beginnings."

Amy Cherry, Ph.D., has worked at Norton for 21 years, primarily in the areas of history, biography, and narrative nonfiction. The works she has edited include the Parkman Prize-winning A Murder in Virginia by MacArthur fellow Suzanne Lebsock and the James Beard Award-winner A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove by Laura Schenone. In fiction, she splits her time between edgy works such as Irvine (Trainspotting) Welsh's new novel The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs and literary historical fiction, including Jenny White's The Sultan's Seal, which has sold in 11 countries. Heading up Norton's paperback division, she is a staunch supporter of paperback originals.

Michael Chitwood was born and raised in the foothills of the Virginia Blue Ridge and is now a freelance writer living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He is a graduate of Emory & Henry College (BA) and the University of Virginia (MFA). Ohio Review Books has published two books of his poetry -- Salt Works (1992) and Whet (1995). His third book, The Weave Room, was published by The University of Chicago Press in the Phoenix Poets series (Spring 1998). His collection of essays, Hitting Below the Bible Belt, was published by Down Home Press in 1998. Chitwood is a regular commentator for radio station WUNC-FM. His book reviews and articles have appeared in newspapers and magazines including the Greensboro News & Record, the Charlotte Observer, and the Raleigh News & Observer.

Paul Cuadros is an award-winning investigative reporter who has written about issues of race and poverty for more than 10 years. In 1999, Cuadros won an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship to report and write about the migration of Latinos to rural towns in the South, and he moved to Pittsboro, North Carolina. Cuadros continues to write about immigrant children and schools in his soon-to-be released book, A Home on the Field (Rayo Publishing, Harper Collins). The book tells how Cuadros founded a high school soccer team of mostly immigrant kids, coached them, and won a state championship in three seasons.

Quinn Dalton is the author of a novel, High Strung, and a story collection, Bulletproof Girl. Her stories have appeared in literary magazines such as Indiana Review, The Kenyon Review, and One Story, and have been anthologized in Glimmer Train's Where Love is Found: 24 Tales of Connection and in Hourglass Books' forthcoming Peculiar Pilgrims. She was a 2002-2003 recipient of a NC Arts Council fellowship. Her story "The Music You Never Hear" is included in the 2006 New Stories from the South: The Year's Best and in the Best American Short Stories Top 100 Notable Stories. She lives in Greensboro.

Francis O'Roark Dowell is the author of Dovey Coe (winner of the 2001 Edgar Award), Where I'd Like to Be, The Secret Language of Girls, Chicken Boy, and Phineas L. MacGuire... Erupts!, all from Atheneum Books for Young Readers. She is a graduate of Wake Forest University and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Massachusetts. She lives in Durham with her husband and two sons.

Daniel Ellison is an attorney in Durham, North Carolina. He has been advising artists and arts organizations for 20 years. He is a frequent lecturer on a variety of arts law topics and writes a column on arts law issues for the theatre that regularly appears in the Southeastern Theatre Conference newsletter. He is a charter member and Executive Director of the 22-year-old NC Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts. He has reviewed numerous publishing contracts for North Carolina writers. He developed Durham Arts Place (which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary), a 10,000-square-foot building in Downtown Durham devoted to providing affordable artist studio spaces. In addition to his law degree, Ellison was also a scholar of Folklore at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill.

Philip Gerard is the author of four books of creative nonfiction, including Creative Nonfiction -- Researching And Crafting Stories of Real Life, and three novels, including Cape Fear Rising. He co-edited with Carolyn Forche Writing Creative Nonfiction and has published numerous essays, short stories, articles, and reviews. He lives in Wilmington and teaches in UNC Wilmington's Department of Creative Writing.

Stephanie Greene is the author of more than 15 children's books, from early readers to middle grade novels. Her books have won the Bank Street College Book of the Year and School Library Journal Book of the Year. Her middle grade book Queen Sophie Hartley was named a 2006 ALA Notable Book. She is also the Regional Advisor of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators in North and South Carolina.

Maureen Ryan Griffin has loved words since her Cat in the Hat days. A writing coach and award-winning poet and nonfiction writer, her many publishing credits include Calyx, Chelsea, and The Texas Review, as well as an essay in Marlo Thomas's New York Times-bestselling The Right Words at the Right Time Volume 2 (2006). She is author of two poetry collections, When the Leaves Are in the Water and This Scatter of Blossoms, and a how-to writing book, Spinning Words into Gold. Maureen lives, writes, and teaches in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she does occasional commentaries for NPR station WFAE.

John Hart is author of the bestselling mystery novel King of Lies. He has held jobs ranging from bartending in a London pub to being a banker at Wachovia. With a degree in French Literature from Davidson College, a Masters in accounting from UNC-Chapel Hill and finally a law degree from Franklin Pierce Law Center, Hart finally chose to pursue a career in law. At a small firm in Salisbury, North Carolina, he worked primarily on criminal defense cases. Shortly after the birth of his daughter he was assigned to defend a child molester -- an assignment he refused. Eventually leaving the law firm, he started writing King of Lies, and sold the novel to St. Martin's Press. Hart is currently working on his second novel.

Marvin Hunt has been writing travel stories for nearly fifteen years. His work has been published in many magazines and newspapers including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the New York Times. He is a regular contributor to the travel section of the Washington Post. A specialist in Shakespeare, he teaches English at North Carolina State University. His book, Looking for Hamlet, will be published by Palgrave-MacMillan in 2007.

Sidney Ryan King graduated in 2000 from Goshen College (Goshen, Indiana), where he studied German and music performance. In 2001 he wrote, produced, and directed A Shroud for a Journey, an award-winning historical documentary about the disappearance of a student from Goshen College. He pursued graduate studies in folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before writing, directing, and producing Pearl Diver, his first feature film. In April this independent film won Best Feature and Grand Jury prizes at the East Lansing Film Festival and Indianapolis International Film Festival, respectively, and recently won Best Narrative Feature at the Winnipeg International Film Festival among other prestigious awards and honors.

Stephen Kirk has been the editor at John F. Blair, Publisher, since 1988. He is the author of two nonfiction books -- Scribblers: Stalking the Authors of Appalachia and First in Flight: the Wright Brothers in North Carolina. His fiction has been reprinted in The Best American Short Stories series.

Barbara Lau is a folklorist and the Director of Community Documentary Programs at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. She is author of the book From Cambodia to Greensboro: Tracing the Journeys of New North Carolinians. She curates an exhibit by the same title for the Greensboro Historical Museum and for the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, NC. In 2002, Lau won a "Coming Up Taller" award from the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2003 she received the annual Indies Arts Award from the Independent Weekly based in Durham, NC.

Valerie Ann Leff's first novel, Better Homes and Husbands was published by St. Martin's Press in 2004 (paperback: St. Martin's Griffin, 2005) and is currently in development for a television series at NBC. Her stories and essays have been published in literary magazines such as the Antioch Review, Carolina Quarterly, Chelsea, Lilith, Other Voices, the Seattle Review, the South Carolina Review, the Sun and many others. She is currently finishing her second book, Risk All. Leff was co-founder of The Great Smokies Writing Program at UNC-Asheville and served as co-director of the program from 2000 to 2005.

Janet Lembke has written ten books of creative nonfiction, six of literary translation, and one cookbook. Her nonfiction centers on her life as part of the natural world in Virginia's hilly Shenandoah Valley and in flat-as-a-flounder coastal North Carolina. The subjects include birds, trees, water, and gardens. In 2005, she received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for a translation of Virgil's "Georgics," a poem focused on farming techniques in ancient Italy -- many of which are still used today. In 2006, she received certification as a Master Gardener.

Michael Malone is the author of ten critically acclaimed novels, including Handling, Sin, Uncivil Seasons, The Last Noel, and the New York Times bestseller The Killing Club, as well as a collection of short stories, Red Clay, Blue Cadillac: Stories of 12 Southern Women. He has also written plays, television shows for ABC, NBC and FOX, essays and two books of nonfiction. Among his prizes are the O Henry, the Edgar, the Writers Guild Award, and the Emmy. He makes his home in Hillsborough, North Carolina.

Phillip Manning is the author of four award-winning books. His first, Afoot in the South, was a finalist for the Benjamin Franklin Award for best travel narrative of 1993. His latest book, Islands of Hope, won a National Outdoor Book Award for 1999. Manning has written over 150 articles, essays, and book reviews for publications such as the Washington Post, Field & Stream, Outdoor Traveler, Backpacker, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. These shorter works have won a number of awards, including Honorable Mention for best environmental essay of 1995 in the Nike Corporation's earthwrite contest. Manning has reviewed science books for the Raleigh News & Observer for almost a decade.

Michael McFee has worked as poetry editor for Carolina Quarterly and is currently a creative writing professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. He has published six collections of poetry, most recently Earthly (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2001). In 2006, his seventh book of poems, Shinemaster, will be published by Carnegie Mellon, and a collection of essays The Napkin Manuscripts: Selected Essays and an Interview will be published by the University of Tennessee Press. He has also edited This is Where We Live: Short Stories by 25 Contemporary North Carolina Writers, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2000, a companion anthology to The Language They Speak is Things to Eat: Poems by Fifteen Contemporary North Carolina Poets, published by UNC Press in 1994.

Sally Hill McMillan formed her agency in 1990 out of Charlotte, North Carolina, and has specialized in representing an eclectic range of fiction and nonfiction writers in the Southeast. Her most prolific novelist is Lynne Hinton, whose sixth novel in six years, The Arms of God, was published last year and whose first mystery, Down by the Riverside, was recently published. She also represents Southern novelists Mike Stewart, Nancy Peacock, Joe Martin, and Jennifer Manske Fenske. Representative nonfiction titles are The Complete Single Mother, The Magic Teaspoon, 20,000 Secrets of Tea, and Southern Gardeners Book of Lists.

MariJo Moore is the author of numerous books that explore her Cherokee/Irish/Dutch heritage. These include Confessions of a Madwoman, The Diamond Doorknob, and Red Woman With Backward Eyes and Other Stories. Moore is editor of Genocide of the Mind: New Native Writings and of Eating Fire, Tasting Blood: Breaking the Great Silence of the American Indian Holocaust. The recipient of numerous literary and publishing awards, she resides in the mountains of western NC. www.marijomoore.com.

Ruth Moose has published two collections of short stories, The Wreath Ribbon Quilt and other Stories (St . Andrews Press) and Dreaming in Color (August House). She is the author of five collections of poetry, To Survive, Finding Things in the Dark, Smith Grove, The Sleepwalker, and Making the Bed. Moose has published individual stories in Atlantic Monthly, New Delta Review, South Carolina Review, St. Anthony Messenger, and others. She received five PEN Awards for Syndicated Fiction, a Robert Ruark Award for Short Story, a North Carolina Writers Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship, and the Oscar Arnold Young Award for Poetry. Moose has been on the Creative Writing Faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill since 1996, and recently she was the Eudora Welty Writer in Residence at Mississippi University for Women.

Robert Morgan is the author of the award-winning and bestselling novel Gap Creek, an Oprah Book Club selection in 2000 and winner of the Southern Book Award for fiction, presented by the Southern Book Critics Circle. His earlier novel The Truest Pleasure was a finalist for the same award and was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable. www.algonquin.com/morgan/.

Sean Murphy's The Hope Valley Hubcap King (Bantam/Dell 2002) won the Hemingway Award for a First Novel. His second novel, The Finished Man, was nominated for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize by Bantam/Dell. His newest, The Time of New Weather, is a satiric comedy about life in America. His nonfiction book One Bird, One Stone (Renaissance, 2002) is a chronicle of Western Zen practice. See www.murphyzen.com.

Joy Neaves is editor at Front Street, an Asheville-based independent publisher of books for children and young adults. She has worked with authors and illustrators Andrea Cheng, Lindsay Lee Johnson, Judith Clark, Per Nilsson, Adam Osterweil, Charlotte Pomerantz, Craig Sumtih, Rob Shepperson, and others. Front Street believes in new voices; half its authors are previously unpublished. www.frontstreetbooks.com.

Tanure Ojaide has published fourteen collections of poetry, a memoir, a collection of short stories, a novel, and four books of literary criticism. His awards include the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Africa Region, the BBC Arts and Africa Poetry Award, twice the Okigbo All-Africa Poetry Award, thrice the Association of Nigerian Authors' Poetry Award, and the North Carolina Fellowship to the Headland Center for the Arts. He was the 2006 recipient of UNC Charlotte's First Citizens Bank Scholar Medal Award, the highest award given to a faculty member for academic and creative works.

Alan Michael Parker is the author of four books of poems, including Jelly Jar Ode & Other Poems, forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2008, and a novel, Cry Uncle, and co-editor and editor of three other volumes, including The Imaginary Poets. His essays and book reviews have appeared in numerous journals, including The New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker; he has lectured at the Sorbonne and on the Menominee Reservation, and read from his work at more than forty colleges nationwide. He teaches at Davidson College, and in the Queens University low-residency MFA program.

Jeanette Pascoe received her Master of Philosophy in Creative Writing from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. She is a publicist at Sarabande Books, a nonprofit literary press located in Louisville, Kentucky. Sarabande publishes quality poetry, essays, and short fiction in beautiful, lasting editions. Founded in 1994 as an alternative to mainstream publishing, Sarabande Books strives to provide talented literary authors with both a final product and visibility -- in short, a "real home" for their work. Sarabande sponsors two literary contests, one for a book of short fiction and one for a book of poetry.

Nancy Peacock is the author of two novels, Life without Water, chosen as a New York Times Notable Book, and Home across the Road. She has worked a variety of jobs ranging from bar maid to dairymaid. Her popular classes, Roundtable Workshop in Prose and Prompt Writing, are offered in the Durham and Chapel Hill areas. She is currently working on a collection of essays about housecleaning and writing.

Dorothy Spruill Redford was born in Columbia, North Carolina. She spent her early years in Queens, New York and received her college training at Queens College. She is curator of Somerset Place State Historic Site and author of Somerset Homecoming and Generations of Somerset Place. Redford lectures extensively on topics including African-American genealogy, history, and historic preservation. From 1993 to 1996, she served as a visiting lecturer at Elizabeth City State University, teaching Oral History Methods.

Pat Riviere-Seel's first collection of poetry, No Turning Back Now, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2004 and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a 2003 graduate of the Queens University of Charlotte MFA Program in Creative Writing and a former journalist and freelance writer. Her poems have appeared in various journals including The Asheville Poetry Review, Crucible, Main Street Rag, and the NC Poetry Society's Pinesong Awards and Award Winning Poems. She has taught in the Great Smokies Writing Program and at the College for Seniors at UNC-Asheville. She is serving her second term as President of the NC Poetry Society.

Rita Rosenkranz, formerly an editor with major New York houses, founded Rita Rosenkranz Literary Agency in 1990. Her adult nonfiction list stretches from the decorative -- Flowers White House Style: More than 125 Arrangements by the Former White House Chief Floral Decorator by Dottie Temple and Stan Finegold (Simon & Schuster) to the dark -- Saving Beauty from the Beast: How to Protect Your Daughter from an Unhealthy Relationship by Vicki Crompton and Ellen Zelda Kessner (Little, Brown; Books for a Better Life Award, 2003). She represents health, history, parenting, music, how-to, popular science, business, biography, popular reference, cooking, spirituality, and general interest titles. Rita works with major publishing houses, as well as regional publishers that handle niche markets. She looks for projects which present a fresh view of familiar subjects, or which link lesser-known subjects with commercial possibilities.

Emily Saladino graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. and the Columbia University Publishing Course in NYC. She has worked at Loretta Barrett Books Literary Agency and is currently at Writers House, LLC. She represents a wide array of fiction and nonfiction, with special interests in food, race/ethnic history, journalistic and narrative/nonfiction, pop culture, popular sociology/history, sports, music, photography, and lifestyle, and writings with international leanings. She currently lives in New York City's West Village.

Sarah Shaber is a resident of Raleigh, NC, and is an award-winning mystery author. She graduated from Duke University with an honors degree in history and received a Master's Degree in Communication from UNC-CH. She has worked in advertising and public relations, winning several awards for radio copywriting and production. In 1996, the manuscript for Simon Said won the St. Martin's Press annual contest for best traditional mystery written by an unpublished author. Snipe Hunt in 2000 was selected as an alternate of the Mystery Guild Book Club. The Fugitive King was published in 2002 and her latest, The Bug Funeral, was published in March 2004.

David Sontag is the director of the Writing for the Screen and Stage Program at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is an award-winning writer and producer and has written for Columbia Pictures, MGM, and Hollywood Pictures. Sontag has also held many important positions in television at many well-known studios such as ABC, NBC, and Fox, during which he was responsible for shows such as MASH and Maya Angelou's Sister Sister. His other achievements include being recognized at colleges across the nation for his work in film and theater, and serving on the Board of Directors for a variety of foundations, including Doc Arts, Inc., EarthEcho International, and North Carolina Hillel.

Douglas Stewart joined Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc., in December 2003; before that he was an agent at Curtis Brown, Ltd. for more than seven years. His primary interests are literary fiction, narrative nonfiction, and young adult fiction. Doug's clients include bestselling writers Carolyn Parkhurst, David Mitchell, Alison McGhee, Jane O'Connor, T Cooper, and Lindsay Moran, among others.

Michael White's third full-length collection, Re-entry, won the 2005 Vassar Miller Prize. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, The Best American Poetry annual, and many other magazines and anthologies. Other awards and honors include fellowships from the NEA and the North Carolina Arts Council. A former board member of the Network, he lives in Wilmington and teaches creative writing at UNCW.

J. Peder Zane is the Book Review Editor and Books Columnist for The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C. Peder's writing has won several national awards, including the Distinguished Writing Award for Commentary from the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Peder serves on the board of directors of the National Books Critics Circle. He edited and contributed to the essay collection, Remarkable Reads: 34 Writers and Their Adventures in Reading, which was published by W.W. Norton. In January, Norton will publish his second book, The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books. Peder is a graduate of Wesleyan University and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Peder was born in New York City.