Mary Oliver’s poetry, with her lyrical connection to the natural world, has firmly established her in the highest realm of American poets. She is renowned for her evocative and precise imagery, bringing nature into clear focus. Her work has been described as an antidote to “inattention and the baroque conventions of our social and professional lives.” (The Harvard Review) Among her countless distinctions are the Pulitzer Prize (for American Primitive) and the National Book Award (for New and Selected Poems Volume One). Over the past two decades she has taught at various colleges and universities. The Ohio native now resides in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Hobe Sound, Florida.

Born in the US to immigrant parents from China, Amy Tan rejected her mother’s expectations that she become a doctor and concert pianist. She chose to write fiction instead. Her novels are  The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, and Saving Fish from Drowning. She is also the author of a memoir, The Opposite of Fate, two children’s books, The Moon Lady and Sagwa, The Chinese Siamese Cat, and numerous articles. Ms. Tan also wrote the libretto for The Bonesetter’s Daughter, which had its world premiere in September 2008 with the San Francisco Opera. Prior to their disbanding, she served as lead rhythm dominatrix, backup singer, and second tambourine with the literary garage band, the Rock Bottom Remainders, whose members included Stephen King, Dave Barry, and Scott Turow. Her newest novel, The Valley of Amazement, moves between the dazzling world of courtesans in turn of the century Shanghai, a remote Chinese mountain village, and the rough-hewn streets of nineteenth-century San Francisco.

Mary Roach is the author of five books: “Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void,” “Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex”, “Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife,” “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers,” and most recently “Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.” Her writing has appeared in Outside, Wired, National Geographic, and the New York Times Magazine, among others. Steven Pinker writes that “fans of lively writing will be delighted by [Gulp.] Once again Roach boldly goes where no author has gone before, into the sciences of the taboo, the macabre, the icky, and the just plain weird. And she conveys it all with a perfect touch: warm, lucid, wry, sharing the unavoidable amusement without ever resorting to the cheap or the obvious.”

Billy Collins is an American phenomenon. No poet since Robert Frost has managed to combine high critical acclaim with such broad popular appeal. Collins has published eight collections of poetry, including “Questions About Angels,” “The Art of Drowning,” “The Trouble With Poetry and Other Poems,” and most recently, “Horoscopes for the Dead.” His book “Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems 2003 – 2013,” will be released in October 2013. In June 2001, Billy Collins was appointed United States Poet Laureate 2001-2003. In January 2004, he was named New York State Poet Laureate 2004-06. Billy Collins is a Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York, as well as a Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute at Rollins College.