Dennis Lehane is the author of bestsellers Mystic River, Shutter Island, Gone Baby Gone, and Live By Night, all of which have been made into award-winning films.

He is one of the most celebrated and critically acclaimed authors of his generation and the recipient of the Shamus Award for Best First Novel, the Edgar, Anthony and Barry awards for Best Novel, and the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction.

His work has been translated into over three dozen languages. He has written for The Wire, Boardwalk Empire, Bloodline, and the forthcoming Mr Mercedes, based on the Stephen King novel. Dennis was born and raised in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and lives in California with his family.

George Pelecanos was born in Washington, D.C. in 1957. He worked as a line cook, dishwasher, bartender, and woman's shoe salesman before publishing his first novel in 1992.

Pelecanos is the author of twenty books set in and around Washington, D.C.: A Firing Offense, Nick's Trip, Shoedog, Down By the River Where the Dead Men Go, The Big Blowdown, King Suckerman, The Sweet Forever, Shame the Devil, Right as Rain, Hell to Pay, Soul Circus, Hard Revolution, Drama City, The Night Gardener, The Turnaround, The Way Home, The Cut, What It Was, The Double, and The Martini Shot. He has been the recipient of the Raymond Chandler award in Italy, the Falcon award in Japan, and the Grand Prix Du Roman Noir in France.

Hell to Pay and Soul Circus were awarded the 2003 and 2004 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. The Turnaround won the Hammett Prize for literary excellence in the field of crime writing. His fiction has appeared in Playboy, Esquire, and the collections Unusual Suspects, Best American Mystery Stories of 1997, Measures of Poison, Best American Mystery Stories of 2002, Men From Boys, and Murder at the Foul Line. He served as editor on the collections D.C. Noir and D.C. Noir 2: The Classics, as well as The Best Mystery Stories of 2008. He is an award-winning essayist who has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, GQ, Sight and Sound, Uncut, Mojo, and numerous other publications. Esquire magazine called him "the poet laureate of the D.C. crime world." In Entertainment Weekly, Stephen King wrote that Pelecanos is "perhaps the greatest living American crime writer." Pelecanos would like to point out that Mr. King used the word "perhaps."

Pelecanos was a producer, writer, and story editor for the acclaimed HBO dramatic series, The Wire, winner of the Peabody Award, the AFI Award, and the Edgar. He was nominated for an Emmy for his writing on that show. He was a writer and co-producer on the World War II miniseries The Pacific, produced by Steven Spielberg, and most recently worked as a writer and Executive Producer on the HBO series Treme. Pelecanos lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. He is at work on his next novel.

Megan Abbott is the author of The End of Everything, Dare Me (CWA Steel Dagger shortlist) and The Fever (Strand Critics Award for Best Novel of the Year and International Thriller Writers Best Hardcover Novel of the Year). She is co-writer of the smash-hit Sky Atlantic drama The Deuce. She lives in Queens, New York.

Lawrence Block has been writing award-winning mystery and suspense fiction for half a century. His newest book is The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes. His other recent novels include The Burglar Who Counted The Spoons, Hit Me, and A Drop Of The Hard Stuff, featuring Matthew Scudder, brilliantly embodied by Liam Neeson in the new film "A Walk Among The Tombstones."

He's well known for his books for writers, including the classic Telling Lies For Fun & Profit and Write For Your Life, and he has recently published The Crime of Our Lives, a collection of his writings about the mystery genre and its practitioners.

He has also written episodic television ("Tilt!") and the Wong Kar-wai film "My Blueberry Nights." His dozen previous anthologies include Manhattan Noir, Manhattan Noir 2, and Dark City Lights. He lives in New York.

Joseph Bruchac is the author of many critically acclaimed novels, poems, and stories, many drawing on his Abenaki heritage. Mr. Bruchac and his wife, Carol, live in upstate New York.

Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction. Among other honors, he has received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and his novels have been selected as finalists for the Firecracker Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Charyn lives in New York.

Reed Farrel Coleman, called "a hard-boiled poet" by NPR's Maureen Corrigan and the "noir poet laureate" in the Huffington Post, is the Edgar-nominated author of twenty-five novels and three novellas, including the critically acclaimed Moe Prager series.

A three-time winner of the Shamus Award, he has also won the Anthony, Macavity, Barry, and Audie awards.

Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Eating Animals. He has also edited a new modern edition of the sacred Jewish Haggadah.

He edited the anthology A Convergence of Birds and his stories have been published in the Paris Review, Conjunctions and the New Yorker.

Everything Is Illuminated won the National Jewish Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award. Jonathan Safran Foer teaches Creative Writing at New York University.

William Kent Krueger is the New York Times bestselling author of The River We Remember, This Tender Land, Ordinary Grace (winner of the Edgar Award for best novel), and the original audio novella The Levee, as well as nineteen acclaimed books in the Cork O’Connor mystery series, including Lightning Strike and Fox Creek.

He lives in the Twin Cities with his family.

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction.

She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Luis Alberto Urrea is the bestselling author of The Water Museum, The Devil's Highway, The Hummingbird's Daughter, Into the Beautiful North, and Queen of America, among others.

He has won the Lannan Literary Award, the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize, an American Book Award, the Christopher Award, and an Edgar Award, among other honors.

Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and American mother, he lives outside of Chicago and is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Don Winslow is author of nineteen acclaimed, award-winning, international bestsellers including the #1 international bestseller The Cartel, The Power of the Dog, Savages, and The Winter of Frankie Machine several of which have been made into movies or are in development.

A former investigator, anti-terrorist trainer, and trial consultant, Winslow lives in Southern California.