Stephen Stark is the author of the recently published novel The Final Appearance of America's Favorite Girl Next Door, which was a USA Today Indie Top 10 pick. His other novels are Second Son and The Outskirts. Second Son was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year, and a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick. He is also a bestselling ghostwriter. His essays, short stories, and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, Poets & Writers, The Washington Post and the New York Times Book Review, among other journals.
Honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Bread Loaf, where he has also taught. He has taught and worked in the administration of the creative writing program at the University of Houston.
Stark currently lives in Virginia and is a graduate of George Mason University and the writing program at Hollins University. He raised three daughters while writing his third novel, which (perhaps not so coincidentally) is written from the female perspective. He also has a teenaged son with whom he bounces ideas for his next novel--about a man who meets his alternate-universe self.
Amelia Kahaney's short stories have appeared in Best American Non-Required Reading, One Story, Crazyhorse, and other publications. She has recently ghostwritten three bestselling young adult novels, but her next book will have her name on its cover. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son.
Austin Ratner returns to the Pen Parentis stage to teach us the value of persistence. His first novel, The Jump Artist, is the 2011 winner of the Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. It was praised as “a remarkable work” by Harper’s Magazine and featured in Publishers Weekly in 2009 as one of ten promising debuts.
His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and has been honored with the Missouri Review Editors’ Prize in Fiction. He attended the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Before turning his focus to writing he received his M.D. from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and he is co-author of the textbook Concepts in Medical Physiology.
He grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and now lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife and two sons.
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