Richard Powers, Swanlund Chair in English at the University of Illinois, is a MacArthur Fellow and the recipient of a 1999 Lannan Literary Award. He is the author of seven novels, including Gain, which won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Historical Fiction from the Society for American Historians; Galatea 2.2 and The Gold Bug Variations, both of which were nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Prisoner's Dilemma. Powers' writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Time, and Harper's. He is renowned for his trenchant, lyrical meditations on the meaning generated by human interaction with technology and history.