W. S. Di Piero was born in South Philadelphia in 1945. He is the author of eight books of poetry, as well as four volumes of translations. He writes about art for the San Diego Reader and has published three collections of essays and criticism on art, literature, and personal experience. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award. He lives in San Francisco and teaches at Stanford University. W. S. Di Piero's Skirts and Slacks is available in Knopf paperback.