Terry Gross

His novel, The Known World, is receiving critical acclaim and has been selected as a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction. It's about a black farmer and former slave who becomes a slave owner. Jones made his literary debut more than 10 years ago with Lost in the City, a collection of short stories about struggling black residents of Washington, D.C. It won the Lannan Literary Award. Until recently Jones made his living as a proofreader for the trade magazine Tax Notes.

His new book is An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America. It explores Washington's moral struggle with the issue of slavery. Wiencek won the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography for his book The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White.

Ettlinger's portrait photography appears on many book jackets. Over the years her subjects have been Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, William Styron, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, Sue Miller, Sarah Vowell and many more. A collection of her portraits, Author Photo: Portraits, 1983-2002 has just been published.