Aimee Bender & Philip Metres

Philip Metres’s writing has appeared widely, including in Best American Poetry, and has garnered two NEA fellowships, two Arab American Book Awards, and the Lannon Literary Fellowship, among others. His work has been called “beautiful, powerful, magnetically original” (Cleveland Arts Prize citation). Lawrence Joseph has written that “Philip Metres’s poetry speaks to us all, in ways critical, vital, profound, and brilliant.” His poems have been translated into Arabic, Polish, Russian, and Tamil. He is a professor of English at John Carroll University in Cleveland, where he teaches literature and creative writing, and lives with his wife Amy and their two daughters. Were it not for the Ellis Island effect, his last name would be Abourjaili.

Aimee Bender is the author of five books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) which was a NY Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) which was an L.A. Times pick of the year, Willful Creatures(2005) which was nominated by The Believer as one of the best books of the year, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010) which won the SCIBA award for best fiction, and an Alex Award, and The Color Master, a NY Times Notable book for 2013. Her books have been translated into sixteen languages. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper’s, Tin House, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, and more, as well as heard on PRI’s “This American Life”and “Selected Shorts”. She lives in Los Angeles with her family, and teaches creative writing at USC.