MARK BRAZAITIS is the author of The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, and Steal My Heart, a novel published in 2000. He is a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and his stories, poems, and essays have appeared in The Sun, Witness, Beloit Fiction Journal, Confrontation, Notre Dame Review, and Shenandoah. He is an assistant professor of English at West Virginia University.