Howard’s winning book, Like Trees, Walking, offers a fictionalized account of a true story, the 1981 lynching of a black teenager in Mobile, Ala.

A native of Montgomery, Ala., Howard graduated from Howard University in 1996 with a B.A. in Journalism. He completed an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Virginia in 2001. He has received fellowships and awards from the Hurston-Wright Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the New Jersey Council on the Arts. His works have been published in Callaloo, Massachusetts Review and Velocity Weekly. He has also recorded commentary for NPR’s All Things Considered. As a former television producer for NFL Films, he received a 2005 Sports Emmy for his work on HBO’s Inside the NFL.

A native of Louisiana, Olympia Vernon won the first Gaines Award for A Killing in This Town, which exposes the hierarchy of a society poisoned by hatred while exploring the power of an individual to stand up to demons of history and end a cycle of violence. Her first book, Eden, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and won the 2004 Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Vernon received a bachelor of arts in criminal justice from Southeastern Louisiana University in 1999 and earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from Louisiana State University in 2002. She teaches writing at Willamette University in Salem, Ore.