W.D. Wetherell’s books include the novel Chekhov’s Sister, the story collection The Man Who Loved Levittown, and the memoir, North of Now. Most recently, the novel A Century of November. In l998, he was awarded the Strauss Living from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, allowing  him to devote five years exclusively to his writing. He lives in rural New England with his family.

Christopher Howell’s Dreamless and Possible: poems New & Selected will be published in spring 2010 by the University of Washington Press.  He teaches at Eastern Washington University’s Inland NW Center for Writers, in Spokane.

Reg Saner’s essays and poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines and more than fifty anthologies, as far afield as Rome and Tokyo. Three of his four poetry collections have won national prizes. The most recent among his several books of nonfiction is Living Large in Nature: A Writer’s Idea of Creationism, forthcoming this spring from the Center for American Places.

Judith Slater’s story collection The Baby Can Sing and Other Stories won a Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and was published by Sarabande Books.  Recent stories have appeared or are forthcoming in StoryQuarterly, Pearl, and Eclipse magazines.  She is on the faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she teaches creative writing and literature.  This is her fourth appearance in Ascent.

Charles Harper Webb’s latest book is Shadow Ball: New & Selected Poems, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in Fall 2009.  Recipient of grants from the Whiting and Guggenheim foundations, Webb directs Creative Writing at California State University, Long Beach.

Christian Barter’s first collection of poetry is The Singers I Prefer.  New poems are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Post Road, Hotel Amerika and Redivider.  A Hodder Fellow in poetry at Princeton University in ’08-’09, he is a trail crew supervisor at Acadia National Park.

Dawn Marano is president and senior editor of Dawn Marano & Associates, an independent editing firm for book-length works of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Previously she served as an editor at the University of Utah Press, where she published many nationally recognized authors of nonfiction, and is currently an instructor in creative writing through the University of Utah’s Lifelong Learning program. She is a co-author of When We Say We’re Home: A Quartet of Place and Memory, a work of literary nonfiction. Her memoir Trusting the Edge won the Utah Arts Council Original Writing Competition for Nonfiction Book in 2005 and the publication prize in 2006, and her work has been cited among Notable Essays in The Best American Essays.