Paul Harding won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Tinkers, “an astringent meditation on loss, family ties, and the presence of the past” (The Guardian) in which a dying elderly man wanders through the rooms of his life’s large and quiet moments. He is also the author of the novel Enon and is an accomplished musician. The director of the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook University, Harding is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Based on the true story of one of the first integrated towns in the Northeast, This Other Eden tells the multigenerational story of an isolated island community off the coast of Maine.

Referred to by Yiyun Li as “one of the most unique voices in American literature,” Hanna Pylväinen is the author of the Whiting Award-winning debut novel We Sinners, the story of a devout but fragmented Midwestern family. A faculty member of Warren Wilson College’s MFA writing program, she has earned fellowships from Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, among others. Her work has been published in numerous periodicals, including Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and The Wall Street Journal. In The End of Drum-Time, Pylväinen weaves the love story of a reindeer herder and a minister’s daughter on the remote 19th century Scandinavian tundra.