Timothy O'Grady is the author of several recent books of nonfiction, including Curious Journey: An Oral History of Ireland's Unfinished Revolution, with Kenneth Griffith; On Golf; and Divine Magnetic Lands: A Journey in America. He has also published three novels, including Motherland, a recipient of the David Hingham Award in 1989, and I Could Read the Sky, a novel with photographs by Steve Pike and winner of Britain's Encore Award for best second novel of 1998. He is currently at work on a novel about a retired IRA sniper, never caught or tried for his crimes, now working as a painter and living under an assumed name in a transient hotel in Los Angeles. He is concurrently working on a book of nonfiction about the barely visible subculture of those living off the societal map - in transient hotels, trailer camps, and the wilderness - in the modern American West. O'Grady has lived in England, Ireland, Spain, and, most recently, Poland, and has written for British newspapers The Times, The Sunday Times, the Guardian, and The Observer, as well as for American magazines Esquire, Golf World, and Conde Nast Traveller, among others. Born in Chicago, he is a citizen of both Ireland and the United States and is a graduate of Northwestern University. Judith Nies is the author of three books of history, including The Girl I Left Behind: A Narrative of the Sixties and Native American History: A Chronology, and the recipient of a Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Grant in Bellagio, Italy, and residential fellowships at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Mesa Refuge. Her article, "The Black Mesa Syndrome: Indian Lands, Black Gold" was a recent finalist for the John Oakes Award in Distinguished Environmental Journalism, and is included in the anthology, The Future of Nature, edited by Barry Lopez. Her current research examines the political, governmental, and environmental arrangements kept in place for decades on Black Mesa, Arizona, the single largest coal strip mining, electrification, and water-harvesting project in the United States. The book she is currently writing chronicles, at a human level, the resulting environmental and cultural damage incurred on the Hopi and Navajo reservations, most of which has remained invisible in mainstream media. Also an essayist and reporter, her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Orion, and Harvard Review. She is a graduate of Tufts University and holds a master's degree from Johns Hopkins University. Lavonne Mueller's plays have been produced to critical acclaim in numerous venues in the United States as well as in such countries as Brazil, Korea, Japan, the Czech Republic, India, Scotland, and England. She is the recipient of honors and awards including a Guggenheim fellowship, a Rockefeller grant, three National Endowment for the Arts grants, Fulbrights to Argentina and Jordan, an Asian Culture Council grant to Calcutta, a Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission grant, and the Roger Stevens Playwriting Award. She is a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fellow, and has been a speaker for the United States Information Agency in India, Finland, Romania, Japan, the former Yugoslavia, and Norway. As a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow, she has helped colleges establish writing programs around the country. Currently she is completing the third play in a trilogy entitled Women In War: Silent Screams. The final play explores the experiences of twenty-five severely disfigured Japanese women brought to America in 1955 for reconstructive surgery following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and is based on historical events. She holds a B.A. from Indiana State and a graduate degree from Northern Illinois University. Cristina Garcia is a Cuban-born American journalist and novelist. After working for Time as a researcher, reporter, and Miami bureau chief, she turned to writing fiction. Her first novel, Dreaming in Cuban, was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has since published three more novels - The Aguero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, and A Handbook to Luck — and has edited books of Cuban and other Latin American Literature. She was educated at Barnard College and Johns Hopkins University.