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Mike Sager is a bestselling author and award-winning reporter. He's been called "the Beat poet" of American journalism. For more than a decade he has worked as a Writer-at-Large for *Esquire* magazine. Sager's career in journalism began in 1978, when he quit law school after three weeks to take a job on the graveyard shift as a copy boy at *The Washington Post*. Eleven months later, he was promoted to staff writer by Metro Editor Bob Woodward, of Watergate fame. Sager left the Post after six years to pursue a career in magazines. His first collection of articles, *Scary Monsters and Super Freaks*, published in 2003, was a *Los Angeles Times* bestseller, as was his second, *Revenge of the Donut Boys*, published in 2007. His first novel, *Deviant Behavior*, was published by Grove/Atlantic's Black Cat in April, 2008. A third collection, *Wounded Warriors*, was published in October, 2008 and received the Military Writers Society of America Founder's Award and the American Author's Association Golden Quill Award. A former Contributing Editor of *Rolling Stone* and Writer-at-Large for *GQ*, Sager has also written for *Vibe*, *Spy*, *Interview*, *Playboy*, *Washingtonian* and *Regardies*. He was recently named Editor-at-Large for *WordsETC*, the first black-owned literary magazine of South Africa. For his stories, Sager has lived with a crack gang in Los Angeles; ex-pat Vietnam veterans in Thailand; a 625 pound man in El Monte,CA; teenage pitbull fighters in the Philadelphia barrio; Palestinians in the Gaza Strip; heroin addicts on the Lower East Side; Aryan Nations troopers in Idaho; U.S. Marines at Camp Pendleton; Tupperware saleswomen in suburban Maryland; high school boys in Orange County. Eight of his articles have been optioned for or have inspired Hollywood films. Sager has read and lectured at the schools of journalism at Columbia University, NYU, Northwestern, the University of Illinois, and the University of Missouri, and at various other forums; his work is included in textbooks presently in use in college classrooms. Each spring, he leads a popular writing workshop for Literary Journalism majors at the University of California-Irvine, where he is a Pereira Visiting Writer. Fifty-two years old, Sager is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Emory University, and a former intern at the pioneering Atlanta alt-weekly Creative Loafing.

Most of the work in Paul Verhaeghen lab centers around cognitive aging: What happens to people's minds as they grow older? His claim is that there are predictable lines along which people age, which he believes are a function of at least two things: whether the task is verbal or visuo-spatial, and whether the task involves a high need for cognitive control in working memory or not. The lab's current experimental work focuses on the latter part: the cognitive control hypothesis. Cognitive control concerns dealing with complex tasks in a complex environment, which includes: making sure that only the appropriate stimuli from the environment enter into consciousness; continuously updating the content of working memory; switching between different tasks; coordinating the different actions that need to be performed; and switching back and forth between relevant stimuli.

Poet Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. Her first poetry collection, *Domestic Work* (2000), won the inaugural 1999 Cave Canem poetry prize, a 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her second collection, *Bellocq's Ophelia *(2002), received the 2003 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, was a finalist for both the Academy of American Poets' James Laughlin and Lenore Marshall prizes, and was named a 2003 Notable Book by the American Library Association. Her work has appeared in several volumes of* Best American Poetry*, and in journals such as *Agni*, *American Poetry Review*, *Callaloo*, *Gettysburg Review*, *Kenyon Review*, *New England Review*, and *The Southern Review*, among others. She has a B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, and an M.F.A in poetry from the University of Massachusetts. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Kurt Andersen is the author of the novels *Heyday* and *Turn of the Century*. *Heyday* was included on several best-books-of-the-year lists, and won the Langum Prize as the best American historical novel of 2007. *Turn of the Century* was a national bestseller. He has also written for film, television and the stage. He has written screenplays for Walt Disney Pictures and Village Roadshow. Currently, GreeneStreet Films is developing *Turn of the Century* as a film, for which he is serving as an executive producer. He is also developing a series for HBO. During the 1990s he was executive producer and head writer of two prime-time specials for NBC, *How to Be Famous* and *Hit List*. He was co-author of *Loose Lips*, a satirical off-Broadway revue. He is also host and co-creator of *Studio 360*, the Peabody Award-winning cultural magazine show produced by Public Radio International and WNYC. From 2001 through 2004 he served as a creative consultant to Universal Television, helping to create the Trio cable channel and to shape Universal's TV programming. From 2004 through 2008 he wrote a column called "The Imperial City" for *New York* (one of which is included in The Best American Magazine Writing 2008), and contributes to *Vanity Fair* (where piece of his won a 2009 Deadline Club Award). He was previously a columnist for *The New Yorker* ("The Culture Industry") and Time ("Spectator"). He began his career in journalism at *Time*, where during the 1980s he was an award-winning writer on politics and criminal justice before becoming, for eight years, the magazine's architecture and design critic. As an editor, he co-founded the legendary *Spy*, which transformed journalism and became profitable after three years. He also served as editor-in-chief of *New York* magazine during the mid-90s, presiding over its editorial reinvigoration and record profitability. In 1999 he co-founded *Inside*, an online and print publication covering the media and entertainment industries, and in 2004 and 2005 he oversaw a relaunch of *Colors* magazine. And he is editor-at-large for Random House, responsible for finding, conceiving, and overseeing non-fiction books.

Born in London in 1968, Nadine Robinson received a BA from State University at Stony Brook, New York in 1995, and an MFA from New York University in 1997. She has been honored with artist in residencies at several prestigious venues including at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1997 and the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2000.

Adam Pendleton is an artist based in New York.