Dennis Barone is a Professor of English and Director of the American Studies Program at Saint Joseph College in West Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of six books of short fiction, most recently Field Report (Quale Press, 2011). He is also the author of two novellas, Temple of the Rat (Left Hand Books, 2000) and God’s Whisper (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005), and the author of a collection of prose poems, The Walls of Circumstance (Avec Books, 2004). Bordighera Press published his study of Italian-American narrative America / Trattabili in 2011. Barone is co-editor with James Finnegan of Visiting Wallace: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Wallace Stevens (University of Iowa Press, 2009) and editor of Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). Left Hand Books published his selected poems volume one, Separate Objects , in 1998; volume two is the Shearsman edition of Parallel Lines. He has edited two poetry anthologies: New Hungers for Old: One-Hundred Years of Italian-American Poetry (Star Cloud Press) and Connecticut Poetry: From the American Revolution to the Present (Wesleyan University Press). A graduate of Bard College, he received his Ph.D. in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1992 he held the Thomas Jefferson Chair, a distinguished Fulbright lecturing award, in the Netherlands, and in 1997 he received the America Award for fiction.