Behind The Book: Charles Bock and Peter Tractenberg

Charles Bock is the author of the debut novel Beautiful Children, which has been hailed by author A.M. Homes as “near-genius” and called “one of the most anticipated debut novels in years” by The New York Times Magazine. Bock earned a Master's of Fine Arts in fiction and literature from Bennington College and has received fellowships from Yaddo, UCross, and the Vermont Studio Center. He has taught fiction at the Gotham Writers Workshop in New York City and his short fiction has been published in Esquire Magazine.

Peter Trachtenberg is the author of 7 Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh and The Book of Calamities: Five Questions about the Meaning of Suffering, which will be published by Little, Brown in August 2008. In 2007, he won the prestigious Whiting Award for emerging writers of exceptional talent and promise. Trachtenberg’s essays and short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and Bomb, and his commentaries have aired on NPR's “All Things Considered.” He has also performed his monologues at Dixon Place, PS 122, and The Kitchen. He received the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction and the Jerome Lowell DeJur Award for Fiction from the City College of New York. He has taught at Brown University, The New School, Johns Hopkins, NYU, the School of Visual Arts, and City College of New York. He lives in Red Hook, with his wife, Mary Gaitskill.

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Behind the Book is a grassroots literacy nonprofit working with low-income students in NYC public schools. Our mission is to excite children and young adults about reading. Working in the 1st -12th grades, we bring authors and their books into individual classrooms to build literacy skills and a new generation of book readers. www.behindthebook.org