Bios
Festival participants include:
JONATHAN AMES is the author of the novels I Pass Like Night, The Extra Man, and Wake Up, Sir!, and the essay collections What's Not to Love?, My Less Than Secret Life, and I Love You More Than You Know. He is the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a former columnist for the New York Press. Ames performs frequently as a storyteller and comedian and has been a recurring guest on the Late Show with David Letterman.
DAN KENNEDY is the author of Loser Goes First: My Thirtysomething Years of Dumb Luck and Minor Humiliation, the editor of Reallysmalltalk.com and a frequent contributor at McSweeney's. His work also appears in various anthologies including The Encyclopedia of Exes, Mountain Man Dance Moves: The McSweeney's Book of Lists, and the Los Angeles Times Best Seller Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans: The Best of McSweeney's Humor Writing. Kennedy's second book, Rock On, a corporate rock comedy, is due out in early 2008.
JOE GARDEN was born above a bar in Chicago's south side in 1970, and grew up seven miles outside a town of 5,000 in Wisconsin. At 23, he was lucky enough to ingratiate himself to the staff of The Onion. After 14 years of getting by on his personality, Garden is now the features editor and proprietor of Joe's Cold Beverages, a thriving bodega that serves the soda and candy needs to the fat-asses of the Onion office.
JOHN HARWOOD is the chief Washington correspondent for CNBC and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal.
PAT OLESZKO is a performance and installation artist whose work has appeared in the Museum of Modern Art, Sesame Street Magazine, Ms., Playboy, and Artforum. Her awards and grants include the Rome Prize and fellowships from the National Endowments for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. The New York Times Magazine calls Oleszko “a founding force majeure in performance art and video… a raw comic vision.”
GEORGE SAUNDERS' books include Civilwarland in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and, most recently, In Persuasion Nation. A faculty member at Syracuse University and a contributor to The New Yorker, Harper's, and GQ, Saunders has won four national magazine awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Entertainment Weekly has called Saunders one of the 100 most creative people in entertainment. Thomas Pynchon has called Saunders ”an astoundingly tuned voice—graceful, dark, authentic, and funny--telling just the kinds of stories we need to get us through these times.” Vince Passaro recently wrote in The Nation, “If you are a new reader of George Saunders, the first thing you ought to know is that Saunders is the funniest writer in America, more likely to make you laugh in public, if that's where you're reading his books, than any writer since P.G. Wodehouse. The competition — David Sedaris, Tom Wolfe, Christopher Buckley – isn't even close.”
JASON SCHNEIDERMAN’s poems have appeared in Tin House, Grand Street, and Best American Poetry 2005, among other magazines and anthologies. A Chancellor's Fellow at the City University of New York, Schneiderman teaches literature at Hunter College and has received fellowships from Yaddo, Bread Loaf, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. The poet Tom Sleigh called the poems in Schneiderman's first collection, Sublimation Point, “grave, sweetly questioning, often irreverently funny.”
SARAH PAYNE STUART is the author of the acclaimed novels Men in Trouble and The Year Roger Wasn't Well and the comic memoir My First Cousin Once Removed: Money, Madness, and the Family of Robert Lowell, which The New York Times Book Review called a “story with so much intelligence, humor and affection brought to bear that even the monsters it occasionally offers up are appealing.” Stuart lives in Concord, Massachusetts, with her husband and three children. She’s at work on a non-fiction book called Guilt In a Small Town.