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Stephanie Powell Watts teaches at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Penn. She wins the Gaines Book Award for her debut book, "We Are Taking Only What We Need."
Ms. Watts' work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize and Best New Stories from the South anthologies, as well as Oxford American, New Letters and African American Review. She has recieved an Atlantic Monthly nonfiction prize. She once was a Jehovah's Witness minister, a shoestring factory worker and a food service worker in her home state of North Carolina.
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Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. He moved to the U.S. with his mother and sister, joining his father, who had fled the communist revolution in Ethiopia two years before. Dinaw is a graduate of Georgetown University and of Columbia University's MFA program in fiction.
His first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007), 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. His second book, How to Read the Air, was published in 2010, and won the Gaines Award.
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Raised in the Flushing and Rosedale neighborhoods of Queens, New York, Victor LaValle won the Gaines book award his novel, Big Machine. He graduated with a degree in English from Cornell University and a master’s from the Fine Arts Program of Creative Writing at Columbia University. He is an assistant professor at the Columbia University School for the Arts.
His Slapboxing with Jesus, a collection of 11 stories, won the PEN/Open Book Award. The Ecstatic, a novel published in 2002, was compared to works by Ken Kesey and John Kennedy Toole and was a finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. LaValle has written essays and book reviews for GQ, Essence and the Washington Post.
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Jeffery R. Allen is the author of two collections of poetry, Stellar Places (Moyer Bell 2007) and Harbors and Spirits (Moyer Bell 1999), and two works of fiction. The widely-celebrated Rails Under
My Back won The Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for Fiction. Born in Chicago, Allen holds a Ph.D. in English (creative writing) from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is currently a faculty member in the writing program at the New School. He is the founder and executive director of the Pan African Literary Forum, an international, nonprofit literary organization that serves writers and which holds an annual writers’ conference in Ghana.
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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.
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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.
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