The Telling Room is a nonprofit writing center in Portland, Maine, dedicated to the idea that children and young adults are natural storytellers.
Richard Blanco, the 2013 inaugural poet, was "made in Cuba, assembled in Spain, and imported to the United States"—meaning that his mother, seven months pregnant, and the rest of the family arrived as exiles from Cuba to Madrid where he was born in 1968, before they emigrated to the United States, settling in Miami. Blanco is the author of four previous poetry collections including, most recently,
Looking for the Gulf Motel, and is the winner of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award. He lives in Bethel, Maine.
Jonathan Lethem is the author of six novels, including the bestsellers
The Fortress of Solitude and
Motherless Brooklyn, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Brooklyn and Maine.
Bill Roorbach (born August, 1953 Chicago, Illinois) is an American novelist, short story and nature writer, memoirist, journalist, blogger and critic. Roorbach has authored fiction and nonfiction works including Big Bend, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and the O. Henry Prize. Most recently he published the novel Life Among Giants.
Roorbach and his wife, painter Juliet Karelsen, have one daughter, Elysia Pearl
Ann Beattie has been included in four O. Henry Award Collections and in John Updike’s The Best American Short Stories of the Century. In 2000, she received the PEN/Malamud Award for achievement in the short story form. In 2005, she received the Rea Award for the Short Story. She and her husband, Lincoln Perry, live in Key West, Florida, and Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is Edgar Allan Poe Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.
