•  Jennifer Haigh, author of the short story collection News From Heaven and four critically acclaimed novels: Faith, The Condition, Baker Towers and Mrs. Kimble; recipient of the PEN/Hemingway and PEN/L.L. Winship awards; and writer with fiction in The Atlantic, Granta, The Best American Short Stories 2012, and many others.
•  Georgia Sassen, from Harvard, Massachusetts, writes poetry “entwining images from nature with issues in human relations”; she is a clinical psychologist and founder of BRIK, Building Resilience in Kids; her work appears in chapbooks Lines in the Landscape: Plein Air Poetry at Fruitlands and An Extravagant Canopy: Plein Air Poetry at Old Frog Pond Farm, 2011, also South Street: A Literary Journal – Thresholds, 2012.
•  Peter Brown, author of A Bright Soothing Noise; winner of the 2010 Katherine Ann Porter Prize in Short Fiction; published in the Harvard Review, The Mississippi Review, Post Road, among others; currently working on novel The Children of Design and translations of poetry collections Elsa, by French writer Louis Aragon and Elsewhere on Earth by French poet Emmanuel Merle; he is senior editor of literary journal Salamander.
•  Lauren Slater, our Artist-in-Residence, author of nine books including Playing House: Notes of a Reluctant Mother, The $60,000 Dog: My Life with Animals and Opening Skinner’s Box; recipient of a 2004 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship; finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for excellence in science writing; essayist with April’s cover story for National Geographic; she is often featured in The New York Times Magazine, Harpers, Elle, and Self; and has eight inclusions in The Best American Essays series.

With guest host Laura Vilain

•  Tehila Lieberman,  winner of the 2012 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction for her collection Venus in the Afternoon; recipient of the Stanley Elkin Memorial Prize and the Rick DeMarinis Short Fiction prize; and author of the forthcoming novel The Last Holy Man.
•  Karen Propp, author of The Pregnancy Project: Encounter with Reproductive Therapy and co-editor of bestselling anthology Why I’m Still Married: Women Write Their Hearts Out on Love, Loss, Sex, and Who Does The Dishes; also In Sickness & In Health and The Pregnancy Project;  nonfiction stories in Prevention, Salon.com, and  Lilith; and fellowship winner from Massachusetts Cultural Center for the Arts.
•  Evan Warren,  raised in Harvard, Massachusetts, is currently finishing his undergraduate degree at Marymount Manhattan, where he leads the editorial staff for the college’s in house literary magazine; winner of the 2011 Joseph P. Clancy Award for Poetry.
•  Lauren Slater, author of nine books; her most recent is Playing House: Notes of a Reluctant Mother, and The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals, and before that Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the 20^th Century.  Slater’s work has been translated into 17 languages.

With guest host Laura Vilain