Jennifer Haigh is a novelist and short story writer. Her first book, *Mrs. Kimble*, won the 2004 PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Her second,* Baker Towers*, was a *New York Times* bestseller and won the 2006 PEN/L.L. Winship Award for outstanding book by a New England author. Both have been published in nine languages. Other fiction has been published in *Granta*, *Ploughshares*, *Five Points*, *Good Housekeeping* and other places.

Michelle Hoover teaches writing at Grub Street and at Boston University, and her short fiction has been published in numerous collections and literary journals including *Confrontation*, *The Massachusetts Review*, *Prairie Schooner*, and *Best New American Voices*. She has been a Bread Loaf Writer's Conference scholar and the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and in 2005 she won the PEN/New England Discovery Award for Fiction. Called "innovative" by* Poets & Writers* magazine and selected as one of their debut fiction picks of 2010, *The Quickening* explores the lives of two farm women, struggling to carve out a life for themselves and for their families as the Great Depression and the rugged Midwestern land threaten to snatch it from them.*The Quickening* has received a starred review from *Publisher's Weekly*, rare for a debut novel, and bestselling author Margot Livesey has praised Hoover's first work as "such a fully realized, sensually vivid, psychologically intelligent novel that it's hard to believe it is a debut, but it is and a sparkling one."