Richard Armstrong is the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum in New York. Before joining the Guggenheim, in 2008, he was the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Carnegie Museum of Art.
Marcelle Clements’s most recent book is a novel, Midsummer. Her articles and essays have appeared in many national publications. She teaches a course on Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time at New York University.
Janine di Giovanni, the author of The Place at the End of the World and other books, is a reporter who has covered numerous war zones, including Chechnya and Iraq, for such publications as the Times of London and Vanity Fair.
Brigid Dorsey lived in Maine, upstate New York, and New Jersey after Paris. She is a writer and editor who lives in Columbia County, New York.
Alicia Drake wrote The Beautiful Fall, a nonfiction account of fashion in Paris in the 1970s, which was published in 2006. She is working on a novel.
Roxane Farmanfarmaian was born in Salt Lake City and raised in Holland and now lives in England, where she is a lecturer at the University of Cambridge. A former editor and journalist, she wrote Blood and Oil: A Prince’s Memoir of Iran, from the Shah to the Ayatollah.
Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni is a Paris-based journalist and author of a biography of the Oscar-winning film producer Sam Spiegel. She has worked at Chanel and W magazine and was European editor of American Harper’s Bazaar.
Mark Gaito is a television producer and writer who lives in Paris.
Andrew Hurley (translator of Zoé Valdés’s text) has translated numerous works of fiction and poetry from the Spanish and is perhaps best known for his rendering of Jorge Luis Borges’s Collected Fictions. He is a professor emeritus of literature and translation at the University of Puerto Rico.
Diane Johnson is a novelist (Le Divorce, Lying Low, etc.) and critic who lives part of the time in Paris. Her latest novel is called Lulu in Marrakech.
Alice Kaplan teaches French at Yale University. Her recent books include The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach and The Interpreter.
Patric Kuh is the author of The Last Days of Haute Cuisine: The Coming of Age of American Restaurants and is the restaurant critic of Los Angeles magazine.
Julie Lacoste began her blog, Un temps de retard (A Delayed Time: The Diary of a Homeless Mother), in September 2008. She ended it the following year after moving into a subsidized apartment in Paris. She works at a university library.
David Lebovitz lived in San Francisco for twenty years and worked in the pastry department at Chez Panisse. He currently lives in Paris and blogs at davidlebovitz.com. His memoir, The Sweet Life in Paris, was published in 2009. His latest cookbook is Ready for Dessert.
Janet McDonald was the author of a memoir, Project Girl, and six novels for young adults. Her last book, Off-Color, was published in 2007. She died that year, at the age of fifty-three, in Paris.
Jeremy Mercer is the author of four books, including Time Was Soft There, his memoir of life in a Parisian bookstore, and When the Guillotine Fell, a philosophical investigation of the last execution in France. He lives in Marseilles. www.jeremymercer.net.
Noelle Oxenhandler is the author of three books, including her recent memoir The Wishing Year: A House, A Man, My Soul. She teaches creative writing at Sonoma State University.
Christina Phillips (translator of Samuel Shimon’s text) has translated a number of works from the Arabic, including, most recently, Naguib Mahfouz’s Morning and Evening Talk. She lives in London.
Joe Queenan is the author of ten books, including Closing Time, a memoir that was published in 2009. He lives in Tarrytown, New York, and has returned to Paris on at least twenty different occasions.
Penelope Rowlands is the author of, most recently, A Dash of Daring: Carmel Snow and Her Life in Fashion, Art, and Letters and is the editor of this anthology.
Stacy Schiff’s year in Paris resulted in A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize. Schiff won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov). Her most recent book is Cleopatra: A Biography.
Karen Schur was born in South America and has lived in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the South Pacific. She now lives in Thailand, outside Bangkok, and is at work on a novel.
David Sedaris is the author of numerous books of personal essays, including, most recently, When You Are Engulfed in Flames. He won the Thurber Prize for American Humor in 2001. He lives in Paris.
Samuel Shimon is an Assyrian writer and editor. Born and raised in Iraq, he has also lived in Damascus, Amman, Beirut, Nicosia, Cairo, Tunis, and Paris. He has been based in London since 1996. His novel, The Assyrian Guerrilla, has just been published in Arabic.
Valerie Steiker is the culture editor at Vogue and the author of The Leopard Hat: A Daughter’s Story. She coedited the anthology Brooklyn Was Mine and has worked on the editorial staffs of Artforum and the New Yorker.
Judith Thurman, a staff writer at the New Yorker, is the author of Cleopatra’s Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire; Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, which won the National Book Award in 1983; and Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette.
Lily Tuck’s novel, The News from Paraguay, won the 2004 National Book Award. Her most recent work is a biography, Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante.
Zoé Valdés is the author of Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada and Dear First Love, among other novels. She has been named a chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. Born in Cuba, she has lived in Paris since 1995.
Véronique Vienne is the author of the best-selling The Art of Doing Nothing and of numerous articles, essays, and books on design, photography, and architecture. She now lives in Paris after having spent most of her adult life in New York.
Judith Warner is the author, most recently, of We’ve Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication, as well as Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. She is a frequent contributor to the opinion pages of the New York Times.
Caroline Weber teaches French and comparative literatures at Barnard College and Columbia University. Her most recent book is Queen of Fashion: What Marie-Antoinette Wore to the Revolution. She contributes to the New York Times Book Review and other publications.
Walter Wells worked at the International Herald Tribune for twenty-five years and retired as its executive editor in 2005. He was awarded the French Légion d’honneur the following year. His We’ve Always Had Paris … and Provence, written with his wife, the food writer Patricia Wells, was published in 2008.
Edmund White won the National Book Critics Circle Award for his biography of Jean Genet. He has also written eight novels, several memoirs, and short biographies of Proust and Rimbaud. He teaches writing at Princeton University.
C. K. Williams is the author of numerous books of poetry, including The Singing, which won the National Book Award in 2003, and a translator from both the French and ancient Greek. He teaches at Princeton and lives part of each year in France.