"A dazzling first book of personal essays . . . each one so sensitively (and sensuously) rooted in actual existence that I continually had to remind myself that I was reading about someone's life, not living it myself. Writing rarely gets this emotionally real."

- Robert Atwan, series editor,
The Best American Essays

Rebecca McClanahan is the author of seven previous books, and poems, essays, and stories in The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Boulevard, Seventeen, and numerous literary magazines and anthologies throughout the country. She has received a Pushcart Prize in fiction, the Wood Prize from Poetry magazine, and the Carter prize for the essay from Shenandoah. Her work appears in The Best American Poetry 1998, has been listed as "notable" in The Best American Essays, and has been aired on NPR's "The Sound of Writing." She earned a Ph.D. and M.A.T. from University of South Carolina and a B.A. from California State University, and has taught classes and workshops at Kenyon College, Davidson College, Wofford College, University of South Carolina, The Hudson Valley Writers' Center, and many other institutions. She also co-directed The University of North Carolina Writing Project and its affiliates, the Open Institute and the Reading-Writing Institute. For fifteen years she was Writer-in-Residence/Director of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Poetry-in-the-Schools Program, for which she received a Governor's Award of Excellence. She lives in New York City.