Kathleen Finneran will teach the 2009 Creative Nonfiction Workshop. She is the author of the memoir The Tender Land: A Family Love Story (Houghton Mifflin, 2000; Mariner Paperbacks, 2003) for which she won the Whiting Writer’s Award. Her essays have been published in various anthologies, including The Place That Holds Our History (Southwest Missouri State University Press, 1990), Seeking St. Louis: Voices from a River City (Missouri Historical Society Press, 2000), and The “M” Word: Writers on Same-Sex Marriage (Algonquin, 2004). She has received the Missouri Arts Council Writers’ Biennial Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship and has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony for the Arts and Cottages at Hedgebrook. She has taught writing at Gotham Writers Workshops, the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Washington University, and St. Louis Community College. She is currently at work on her second memoir, Motherhood Once Removed: On Being an Aunt.

Suzann Ledbetter, who will teach the 2009 Popular Fiction Workshop, is the award-winning author of 20 books, most recently Once A Thief and Ahead of the Game. Along with mysteries and westerns, she has written The Toast Always Lands Jelly-Side Down and Other Tales of Suburban Life and I Have Everything I Had Twenty Years Ago, Except Now It's All Lower, two books of humor about suburban life in the '90s. Since 1988, she has been a columnist for Family Circle magazine's "Flip Side" column.

Teaching the Literary Fiction Workshop is Saher Alam, author of The Groom to Have Been (Random House, 2008). She was born in Lucknow, India, in 1973 and moved to the United States in 1978. She is a graduate of Princeton University and the Creative Writing Program at Boston University. She was a fiction fellow at Emory University, and her stories have appeared in Best of the Fiction Workshops and the journal Literary Imagination.

Richard Newman will teach the Young Writers Institute. His second collection of poetry, Domestic Fugues, will be released on Steel Toe Books in 2009. He is the author of Borrowed Towns, and several chapbooks, including Greatest Hits, Tastes Like Chicken and Other Meditations, and Monster Gallery: 19 Terrifying and Amazing Monster Sonnets! His poems, stories, and essays have most recently appeared or are forthcoming in Ted Kooser's "American Life in Poetry," Best American Poetry 2006, Boulevard, Crab Orchard Review, StoryQuarterly, Tar River Poetry, The Sun, among many others.

Kerri Webster will teach the 2009 Poetry Workshop. She is completing a three-year appointment as Visiting Writer in Residence at Washington University in St. Louis. Her chapbook, Psalm Project, is forthcoming from Albion Books. She is the author of We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone, a book-length collection of poems published by the University of Georgia Press (2005), and Rowing through Fog, a chapbook published by the Poetry Society of America in 2003.