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.

Cris Mazza is the author of over a dozen books, including Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls, which will be released in 2011. A native of Southern California, she relocated to Illinois when she began teaching in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She lives 50 miles west of Chicago with her golden retrievers.

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.

She also talks to the masterminds behind two Chicago-based reading series, The Dollar Store and Quickies.

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.

He descends from downstate Irish farmers and Humboldt Park tenement Italians. He has made a lot of records, mostly with his band Joan of Arc, and is now in his final semester of the SAIC MFAW FYI.

Kate Zambreno is an editor at Nightboat Books and a former senior editor of the Chicago alt-weekly, Newcity. Her reviews and essays have appeared in The Believer, Bookforum, Rain Taxi, and elsewhere. She keeps the literary blog Frances Farmer Is My Sister.

Kate reads from her debut novella O Fallen Angel (Chiasmus Press), a triptych of modern-day America set in a banal Midwestern landscape, inspired by Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion” as well as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

Of the book the performance artist Karen Finley wrote that “Kathy Acker would be proud” and Chris Kraus compared it to Angela Carter’s fairytales.