Karen E. Bender's first novel excerpts have been published in THE NEW YORKER, GRANTA, and STORY magazines. The chapter "Eternal Love" was chosen by Annie Proulx to appear in THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 1997, and was read by Joanne Woodward to a sold-out crowd at Symphony Space in New York; the recording of that reading aired on NPR's SELECTED SHORTSS. Bender also received a prestigious Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award based on a draft of this novel, and it was recently optioned for TV movie development. Picador will publish the novel in England. Bender's fiction has appeared in the IOWA REVIEW and the KENYON REVIEW and has been reprinted in PUSHCART PRIZE XVIII and other anthologies. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she lives in New York with her husband, the writer Robert Anthony Siegel, and their son.

Nina de Gramont is the fiction editor of UNCW's new literary magazine, Ecotone. Publications: Of Cats and Men, Dial Press, 2001; her ficiton has recently appeared in Nerve,Exquisite Corpse, The Cream City Review, Post Road, and Seventeen.