Joan Silber is the author of ten books of fiction. Her first novel won the PEN/ Hemingway Award in 1981; since then, she's received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines, and she's received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. She taught for many years at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program. She lives in Manhattan, on the Lower East Side, with her dog Jolie.