Janet Kauffman is professor of English at Eastern Michigan University. She is the author of three books of short stories, Characters on the Loose, Obscene Gestures for Women, and Places in the World a Woman Could Walk, which won the Rosenthal Award from the Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters; three novels in the trilogy Flesh Made Word: Collaborators, The Body in Four Parts, and Rot; and four collections of poems, including The Weather Book, which was an AWP Award Series Selection, and Five on Fiction.