Barry McCrea has taught comparative literature at Yale since 2004. His novel, The First Verse (Carroll & Graf, 2005; Brandon 2008), won the 2005 Ferro-Grumley prize for fiction and was selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program. It was nominated for an American Library Association Stonewall prize and for a Lambda award and was excerpted in the London Independent on Sunday and the Spanish daily El País. The First Verse was published in Spanish as Literati (DestinoLibro, 2007), and in German as Die Poeten der Nacht (Aufbau, 2008). He is currently working on a second academic book on firstness in fiction, provisionally entitled First Novels, Final Farewells.
Mark Oppenheimer, the editor of the New Haven Review (online at newhavenreview.com), writes for the New York Times Magazine, Slate.com, The American Scholar, and other publications. He is the author of two books: Knocking on Heaven's Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture and Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America. He will be reading from the manuscript of his forthcoming memoir, Wisenheimer: Memories of an Articulate Childhood. He lives in the Westville neighborhood of New Haven, and you can read more about him at markoppenheimer.com.
