Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and grew up in New Jersey. He is the author of the short-story collection Drown and the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which released in September; part of both books first appeared in The New Yorker. He is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Rome Fellowship in Literature. His most recent New Yorker story, "Wildwood", appeared in the June 11th & 18th 2007 Summer Fiction Issue.
Annie Proulx won a pen / Faulkner Award for Fiction for her first novel, Postcards, and a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for her second novel, The Shipping News. She is the author of the story collections Close Range: Wyoming Stories and Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2. Her story "Brokeback Mountain", which appeared in The New Yorker in 1997, received an O. Henry Award and a National Magazine Award, and was the basis of the Academy Award-winning film by Ang Lee.