Kathleen Cambor is the author of The Book of Mercy, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Prize and was awarded the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Excellence in Fiction by an American Woman. For her work on In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden, she was awarded the 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship. From 1997 until the end of 2000, she directed the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. She is at work on her third novel and lives with her husband in Houston, Texas.