Born in North Dakota of Canadian parents, CLARK BLAISE has spent his life perched on borders, looking for a home. He has published nine volumes of stories, three novels and six works of non-fiction. A graduate of the Iowa writers workshop, and former director of Iowa's International Writing Program, he has most recently been visiting professor at the State University of New York-Stony Brook. Since 2002 he has been president of an international body, the Society for the Study of the Short Story in English. BHARATI MUKHERJEE is the author of seven novels (most recently Desirable Daughters and The Tree Bride), two collections of short stories (Darkness and The Middleman & Other Stories), and the co-author, with Clark Blaise, of two books of non-fiction (Days and Nights in Calcutta and The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy), and numerous essays on immigration and American culture. She is the first naturalized U.S. citizen to have won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Best Fiction. She has been a Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley since 1989.