Adam Levin’s stories have appeared in Tin House, McSweeney’s, and Esquire. Winner of the 2003 Tin House/ Summer Literary Seminars Fiction Contest and the 2004 Joyce Carol Oates Fiction Prize, Levin holds an MA in Clinical Social Work from the University of Chicago and an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. He lives in Chicago, where he teaches writing at Columbia College and The School of the Art Institute.

The Instructions
Beginning with a chance encounter with the beautiful Eliza June Watermark and ending four days later with the Events of November 17, this is the story of Gurion Maccabee, age ten: a lover, a fighter, a scholar, and a truly spectacular talker. Ejected from three Jewish day schools for acts of violence and messianic tendencies, Gurion ends up in the Cage, a special lockdown program for the most hopeless cases of Aptakisic Junior High. Separated from his scholarly follow-ers, Gurion becomes a leader of a very different sort, with righteous aims building to a revolution of troubling intensity. The Instructions is an absolutely singular work of fiction by an important new talent who has already been compared to David Foster Wallace by New York magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times.

Additionally, she is co-editor of the Fiction Section of the popular online literary collective The Nervous Breakdown, where she also contributes a regular book review column. Her short fiction has been widely published in venues such as the Chicago Reader, Fence, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner and Five Chapters. Her novel, London Calling, will be published next year. She can be found online at www.ginafrangello.com.

A D JAMESON is a writer, video artist, teacher, and performer. He is the author of the novel “Giant Slugs” (Lawrence and Gibson) and the story collection “Amazing Adult Fantasy,” both forthcoming later in 2010.

JAC JEMC’s chapbook, This Stranger She’d Invited In, is coming out this year from Greying Ghost press, and her first novel, My Only Wife, is forthcoming from Dzanc Books in 2012. She is the poetry editor of decomP, a fiction reader for Our Stories and a bookstore liaison for Tarpaulin Sky. She blogs her rejections in “The Rejection Collection.”

TIM JONES-YELVINGTON’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Sleepingfish, Annalemma and others. His short fiction chapbook, “Evan’s House and the Other Boys who Live There” is forthcoming in Spring 2011 in “They Could No Longer Contain Themselves,” a multiauthor volume from Rose Metal Press. With Megan Milks, he co-hosts “Uncalled for Readings,” Chicago’s “mostly Queer, mostly prose” reading series. He is guest editing Pank Magazine in October as a Queer poetry and prose issue.

CRIS MAZZA writes. Some say too much.

DAVIS SCHNEIDERMAN’s recent and forthcoming works include the novels Drain, Blank: a novel (Jaded Ibis), and The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism’s Parlor Game (Nebraska). He is Director of Lake Forest College Press/&NOW Books, where he edits The &NOW AWARDS: The Best Innovative Writing series.

KATHLEEN ROONEY is a poet and a writer. With Abby Beckel, she is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press. With Elisa Gabbert, she is the author of That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness (Otoliths, 2008). With Counterpoint Press, her prose collection For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs is now available. With her husband, the writer Martin Seay, she lives in Chicago.

ROB STEPHENSON’s Passes Through is just out from FC2. He is an intermedia artist living in Queens, NY.

She graduated from Santa Clara University, earned her Master’s degree from the University of Chicago, and currently lives in New York City.  All Unquiet Things is her first book.

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Robert K. Elder is a journalist, author, film columnist and regional editor for AOL’s Patch.com. Pulitzer-winner Studs Terkel calls Elder “a journalist in the noblest tradition” in his introduction to Elder’s book, “Last Words of the Executed.”

For almost a decade, he served as a staff writer at the Chicago Tribune. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Premiere, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Salon.com, MSNBC.com, The Oregonian and many other publications.

Elder is also the found of Odd Hours Media, the company behind ItWasOverWhen.com and ItWasLoveWhen.com. Sourcebooks recently bought the book publishing rights for each site.

Elder edited “John Woo: Interviews,” the first authoritative chronicle of the filmmaker’s life, legacy and career. He has also contributed to books on poker, comic books and film design.

A former member of the Chicago Film Critics Association, Elder has taught film classes at Facets Film School. He currently teaches journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and Communication. A Montana native and graduate of the University of Oregon, Elder lives and writes in Chicagoland.

He has been known to carry a digital voice recorder.

Sara Levine’s writing has appeared in Nerve, The Iowa Review, Puerto del Sol, Caketrain, Necessary Fiction, Brain, Child, The Fairy Tale Review, and other magazines.

Her essays can be found in The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: 1970 to the Present and A Best of Fence.

Once upon a time she wrested a PhD in literature from Brown University and received an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies.

She chairs the Writing program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Materials (LDSM) is a diverse collective of theatre artists with backgrounds in performance, literary, and visual arts, individually working in a range of performance traditions with such Chicago companies as Redmoon Theater, 500 Clown, CollaborAction, and the Neo-Futurists. The members of the LDSM first collaborated on Impossible Cities: A Utopian Experiment in 2007, directed by Seth Bockley and produced by Walkabout Theatre Company at the Peter Jones Gallery in Chicago. The show consisted of performances, music, and an art exhibition curated by Angela Tillges, all on the theme of utopia. The LDSM formally came into existence later that same year with the instigation of Theoretical Isolation: A Post-Atomic Experiment, a collaboratively generated performance which premiered in 2009 at the urban design project Arcosanti in Arizona and was subsequently presented in Chicago at the Neo-Futurarium. The LDSM has received grants from the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts at Northwestern University and from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, held residencies at the University of Chicago and Arcosanti, and taught workshops at Arizona State University and in the Arcosanti community. The LDSM continues to make and teach collectively devised, research-based performance, which blends physical, visual, and textual approaches to consider a broad range of inquiries prompted by the spatial, the communal, and the urban.

The LDSM performs an excerpt from Theoretical Isolation: A Post-Atomic Experiment, a collaboratively generated performance inspired by the development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and the urban design laboratory Arcosanti. This original interdisciplinary work sets scientific experimentation, Congressional testimony, and old-fashioned magic tricks against the backdrop of Arcosanti’s unique architectural environment. Inspired by the discovery that The Tempest was among the literary texts discussed by scientists at Los Alamos, the performance investigates historical and fictional characters who retreated from civilization in order to re-imagine it, working in geographic isolation to create books and bombs with the potential to change the world. Theoretical Isolation: A Post-Atomic Experiment focuses on a few of these individuals: J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who oversaw the Manhattan Project; Prospero, Shakespeare’s most famous magician; and Paolo Soleri, the architect who founded Arcosanti as a prototypical alternative approach to urban design.

Kyle Beachy’s first novel, The Slide, won the Chicago Reader’s 2009 “Readers’ Choice” award for Best Book by a Chicago Author in the Last Year. The Boston Globe called the novel, “an unusual, and unusually good coming-of-age-story,” and Publishers Weekly described it as, “At once hilarious, strange, and uncomfortable.” His short fiction and essays appear in Knee-Jerk, Hobart, decomP, as a Featherproof MiniBook, and elsewhere. He has lived in Chicago since coming for The School of the Art Institute’s MFA program in 2003, and he currently teaches literature and writing at SAIC, Roosevelt University, and the Graham School of The University of Chicago.

Here, Kyle reads selections from and answers questions about The Most Fun Thing, his upcoming novel about skateboarding, celebrity, bones, and the joys of failure.

Jac’s writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, finished 2nd place in the Marginalia College Contest and placed as a finalist for the Rose Metal Press Chapbook Contest and Sentence Firewheel Chapbook Contest. Jac has completed or is looking forward to residencies at Ragdale and the Vermont Studio Center.

She is poetry editor at decomP, a fiction reader at Our Stories, and is guest-editing issue 7 of Little White Poetry Journal. Mostly though, she blogs her rejections at jacjemc.wordpress.com.