Joan Silber is the author of three previous books. She won the PEN/Hemingway Award for her first novel, HOUSEHOLD WORDS, and has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her short fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, the Paris Review, and other magazines. She lives in New York City and teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.