Write Thing Reading Series

Alissa Nutting's first book, the collection of stories Unclean Jobs for Women & Girls, won the annual Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, and was recently published by Starcherone. She was born in rural Michigan, received a BA degree from the University of Florida, and an MFA degree from the University of Alabama, where she served as Editor for the Black Warrior Review. Her writing has appeared in the fairy tale anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, as well as many other journals, and is often remarked for its combination of the hilarious and the bizarre. She is fiction editor of the literary journal Witness and managing editor of Fairy Tale Review.

Eric Miles Williamson is a novelist and literary critic, member of the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle, and an editor of the American Book Review, Boulevard, and Texas Review. He is the author of four books, all based in and around his native Oakland, California, and immersed in working class beauties and sadnesses; most recently among these is the novel, Welcome to Oakland. Williamson is currently a professor of English at the University of Texas-Pan American. He will be introduced by critic and University of Buffalo Professor Mark Shechner.

Horacio Castellanos Moya was born in 1957 in Honduras , but grew up in El Salvador . Author of nine novels, he worked twelve years as a journalist in Mexico and has lived in Costa Rica, Canada, Guatemala, Spain and Germany, under the auspices of the Frankfurt International Book Fair. Highly regarded as a moral voice against abuses of institutional power, he currently resides in the U.S. as former writer-in-residence of City of Asylum/Pittsburgh . His novels have been translated into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Swedish, and English. Three novels are now available in English—Senselessness, She-Devil in the Mirror, and Dance with Snakes. A fourth, Tyrant Memory, is scheduled for publication in 2011.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the poetry collections, At the Drive-In Volcano, winner of the Balcones Prize, and Miracle Fruit, which was named Poetry Book of the Year by ForeWord Magazine and the winner of the Global Filipino Literary Award. Other awards for her writing include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Pushcart Prize. Her third collection is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2011. She is associate professor of English at SUNY-Fredonia where she was named the Hagan Young Scholar and received the Chancellor’s Medal of Excellence. She lives in Western NY with her husband and two young sons. Her website is www.aimeenez.net.

Thaddeus Rutkowski grew up in central Pennsylvania to a Polish-American father and an Asian-American mother and lives in Manhattan with his wife and daughter. The author of the novels Haywire (Starcherone Books, 2010), Roughhouse (Kaya Press, 1999) and Tetched (Behler Publications, 2005), he teaches fiction writing at the Writer's Voice of the West Side YMCA in New York and has taught at Pace University, the Hudson Valley Writers Center and the Asian American Writers Workshop. He has been the fiction editor of Many Mountains Moving magazine since 2007.

Blake Butler lives in Atlanta and edits the literature blog HTMLGIANT. He is the author of the novella, Ever, and the novel-in-stories, Scorch Atlas. In Spring 2011, Harper Perennial will publish his novel, There Is No Year. He has published more than one hundred stories in magazine and journals, both online and in print, and is considered one of America’s premiere new generation talents in innovative fiction.