The Secret Society of Demolition Writers

Aimee Bender is the author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, which was a New York Times Notable Book; An Invisible Sign of My Own, which was a Los Angeles Times pick of the year; and Willful Creatures, which was nominated by the Believer as one of the best books of the year. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper's, Tin House, McSweeney's, the Paris Review, and many more. She has received two Pushcart Prizes and was nominated for the TipTree Award in 2005. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California.

A former Los Angeles Times crime reporter, Michael Connelly is the author of over twenty novels and nonfiction books, including The Overlook, Blood Work, and The Lincoln Lawyer. His familiarity with the seamy side of Los Angeles adds a steamy kind of street cred to his hardboiled, gritty detective novels, especially his bestselling series of mysteries featuring dark detective Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch.

Chris Offutt is an award-winning author and screenwriter who worked on the HBO drama True Blood and the Showtime series Weeds. His books include Kentucky Straight, The Same River Twice, The Good Brother, Out of the Woods, and No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Best American Short Stories, and many other anthologies. He lives near Oxford, Mississippi.

Lauren Slater is the author of The $60,000 Dog: My Life with Animals and Playing House: Notes of a Reluctant Mother. A psychologist and writer, Lauren is the author of five books of nonfiction: Welcome to My Country, Prozac Diary, Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, Love Works Like This, and Opening Skinner's Box, as well as a collection of short stories, Blue Beyond Blue. She has received numerous awards, including a 2004 National Endowment for the Arts award, multiple inclusions in Best American volumes, and a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Winner of several AudioFile Earphones Awards and a multiple finalist for the APA's prestigious Audie Award, Alan Sklar has narrated nearly two hundred audiobooks, including Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden, The Kennedys: America's Emerald Kings by Thomas Maier, and The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright. Named a Best Voice of 2009 by AudioFile magazine, his work has earned him a Booklist Editors' Choice Award (twice), a Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Award, and Audiobook of the Year by ForeWord magazine. The Dartmouth graduate's theatre credits include Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Seagull, and many modern roles. Alan has also narrated thousands of corporate videos for clients such as NASA, Sikorsky Aircraft, IBM, Dannon, Pfizer, AT&T, and SONY. For several years, he has been the spokesman for TracFone Wireless Co. and can often be seen and heard on TracFone radio and TV spots and infomercials. "I am so pleased, as is my husband, to have found a narrator that holds our attention so well that we have come to compare every other narrator to him (you). So far we have found none with such a talent as yours. We very much plan to listen to as many of your works as we can find." -Sandi King, a letter to Mr. Sklar

Ellen Archer is an acclaimed audiobook narrator and winner of a coveted Audie Award for For the Love of a Dog (available from Tantor). Her recent audiobooks include the New York Times bestseller Smashed by Koren Zailckas, Unhooked by Laura Sessions Stepp, and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami. Producers and publishers describe Ellen as versatile, warm, intimate, fresh, fun, intelligent and sultry. She easily covers the spectrum between familiar and conversational and more authoritative and aggressive deliveries.