Here are the bios of the people who teach our writing workshops.

JULIE ORRINGER (New Fiction Confab, 2011)
Julie Orringer is the author of The Invisible Bridge, a novel (Knopf, 2010), and How to Breathe Underwater, a short story collection (Knopf, 2003). Her stories have been published in The Yale Review, where they’ve twice been awarded the Editors’ Prize for best story of the year; the Paris Review, which awarded her the Discovery Prize in 1998; Ploughshares, which selected her work for the Cohen Award for Best Fiction; Zoetrope All-Story, which nominated her for a National Magazine Award; and by the Washington Post Magazine. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, and her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Granta Book of the American Short Story, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and The Scribner Anthology of American Short Fiction.

KEVIN BROCKMEIER (New Fiction Confab, 2011)
Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Illumination, The Brief History of the Dead and The Truth About Celia, the children’s novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery, and the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer. His work has been translated into fifteen languages, and he has published his stories in such venues as The New Yorker, The Georgia Review, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope, The Oxford American, The Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and New Stories from the South. He has received the Borders Original Voices Award, three O. Henry Awards (one, a first prize), the PEN USA Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA Grant. Recently he was named one of Granta magazine’s Best Young American Novelists. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was raised.

DINAW MENGESTU
Dinaw Mengestu is the author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and How to Read the Air, for which he was awarded the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature. Dinaw was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. He is the recipient of a fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Lannan Literary Award, and received a “5 under 35″ Award from the National Book Foundation and was named one of the New Yorker magazines “Best 20 under 40″ in 2010. His first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, was named a New York Times Notable Book and awarded the Guardian First Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, among numerous other honors. He lives with his wife and two sons in Paris.