April Bernard is a poet, novelist, and essayist; she has been the recipient of the Walt Whitman Prize from the Academy of American poets, a Guggenheim grant, and a Whitney Humanities Center fellowship. Her books of poems are Brawl & Jag, Romanticism, Swan Electric, Psalms, and Blackbird Bye Bye; her novels are Pirate Jenny and Miss Fuller, which was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and other journals, she is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Skidmore College and a member of the faculty at the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars.