Padma Viswanathan's novel, The Toss of a Lemon, has been published in six countries and was shortlisted for for the Commonwealth Prize (Regional) for Best First Book, Amazon.ca First Novel Prize and the Pen Center USA Fiction Award. The novel was her thesis at the University of Arizona, and the work for which she received the Monique Wittig scholarship. Her short fiction has appeared in journals including New Letters, Subtropics, and The Malahat Review, and she took first prize in the 2006 Boston Review Short Story Contest. Other prizes include fellowships from the NEA and the Canada Council for the Arts, and residencies from the MacDowell Colony and the Banff Playwrights' Colony. She now lives in Arkansas, where she is at work on another novel.

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A Seattle native, Susan Meyers has lived and taught language and writing in Chile, Costa Rica, and Mexico. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota in 2004, and she is currently finishing a doctorate in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Arizona. She has strong interests in both the cross-cultural aspects of written communication as well as women's historical struggle to find voice - whether in fiction, poetry, or rhetoric. Her doctoral thesis focuses on written literacy in the lives of migrant women in Mexico, and her novel manuscript, The Candybutcher's Daughter, is fictionalized account of her grandmother's early life as a circus acrobat, under-aged tavern proprietor, WWII welder, and nightclub photographer. Susan used the Wittig scholarship to pay travel expenses to attend a residency at the Hedgebrook Retreat for Women Writers in Whidby Island, WA. Her two months at Hedgebrook during the summer of 2006 were instrumental in helping her produce the first completed draft of her novel manuscript, which she is now revising and preparing for submission. Also, while at Hedgebrook, she met a former-Fulbrighter, who helped give her a sense of how to apply for a Fulbright fellowship. Happily, she was successful, and is now engaged in her own Fulbright year! She believes that in many ways, the seeds of her current achievements lay in that summer at Hedgebrook--which was directly funded by the Wittig scholarship.

Lydia Omolola Okutoro was born in Lagos, Nigeria and raised in New York City. She received her undergraduate degree from Mount Holyoke College and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. She is a former middle school teacher who currently works as an editor at Scholastic, Inc. in New York. Her writing has appeared in Essence Magazine, Worcester Magazine, So To Speak, and Reading Community, a Harcourt Brace textbook. Her first book, Quiet Storm: Voices of Young Black Poets, published by Jump at the Sun/Hyperion Books, was selected by the American Library Association as a Best Book for Young Adults in 2000. Lydia is currently at work on her memoir about being an immigrant child in America and growing up without her family. The Wittig Scholarship helped her fund a writers' workshop in Prague, where she received valuable feedback on the memoir project.

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C.L. Smith is a poet and writer graduating from the University of Arizona with a BA in English Lit. and Creative Writing in Spring 2008. Having lived in many places, locality reproaches her. Her chapbook of poetry is titled Blackberrying.

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Patricia Escárcega received her MFA from the University of Arizona in May 2008. She is currently a graduate student in the School of Information Resources and Library Science. She is finishing her first novel, tentatively titled The Window Seat.

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Bo McGuire hails from Hokes Bluff, Alabama, and currently suffers the Tucson heat gladly where he is a Rogers' Fellow in creative writing at the University of Arizona. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from elimae, Forklift,Ohio, and The Pinch. Currently he is at work on two projects: one, a manuscript of poems called Holler and a second critical work exploring queerness in the U.S. South through hillbilly diva worship.

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Emily DePrang is a writer and journalist whose explorations of identity and visibility have been documented on the blog Pigeon in the Sun, at the WYSIWYG and SMUT reading series in New York, NY, and in her essays for Nerve.com, The Texas Observer, and more. Her work has been republished in the anthologies Best Sex Writing 2006 and We Who Dared Say No to War: American Anti-War Writing From 1812 to Now. She’s currently a Contributing Writer for The Texas Observer, the 2010-2011 Nonfiction Editor for the Sonora Review, and is pursuing her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She is 29.

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