Antonya Nelson teaches at the University of Houston, where she holds the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing. Her first story collection, The Expendables, won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 1990. She is the author of five other short story collections, including Nothing Right (2009), and three novels: Talking in Bed (winner of the Heartland Prize), Nobody’s Girl, and Living to Tell. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the Rea Award for Short Fiction.

Kathryn Cowles’s first book of poems, Eleanor, Eleanor, not your real name, won the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize and was published in 2008. A group of her poems and poem-photograph collages was selected by Cole Swensen to receive the Larry Levis Associated Writers and Writing Programs Poetry Prize for 2009. She has recent and forthcoming work in Interim, Versal, Colorado Review, Octopus, and Pleiades, among others. Cowles earned a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Utah, where she taught in the departments of English, Writing, and Gender Studies. She served as co-editor of poetry for Quarterly West and co-chair of The Working Dog reading series. Cowles is now an Assistant Professor of Poetry and Literature at Ohio Northern University.

In partnership with the University of Utah English Department and Creative Writing Program, the Salt Lake City Arts Council presents the 2009-2010 season of the Guest Writers Series.