(le) poisson rouge

Neil Smith is the author of Bang Crunch (Vintage 2007). This book of stories has been published in America, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and India. Bang Crunch was chosen as a book of the year by The Washington Post and The Globe and Mail (Toronto) and nominated for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. It also won the best first book award presented by the Quebec Writers’ Federation. Neil lives in Montreal where he’s working on a novel titled Heaven Is a Place Where Nothing Ever Happens. His website is bangcrunch.com.

Franz Nicolay is that mustachioed man-about-town and musician you may have seen with such groups as The Hold Steady and World/Inferno Friendship Society. He is the founder of new-music collective Anti-Social Music, and is working on a book for Vol. 1 Press.

Marlon James was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1970. His first novel, John Crow's Devil (Akashic Books, 2005) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and was a New York Times Editors' Choice. The novel will be published in the United Kingdom and Italy in 2008. A new novel, The Book of Night Women will be published by Riverhead Books, also in 2008.

He graduated from The University of the West Indies in 1991 with a B.A in Literature, and Wilkes University in 2006 with an M.A. in Creative Writing. At Wilkes he was awarded Norman Mailer's Norris Church Mailer Scholarship for Creative Writing. His short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Iron Balloons (2006), Bronx Noir (2007) and Silent Voices (2007) for which he received a Pushcart Prize nomination. His non-fiction has appeared in the Caribbean Review of Books.

He has taught at the Calabash International Literary Festival Workshop in Kingston Jamaica for two years. More recently he has taught at the Gotham Writers Workshop in New York City and was a judge for the PEN Beyond Margins Award.