Jill Alexander Essbaum is the author of several collections of poetry and her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, as well as its sister anthology, The Best American Erotic Poems, 1800-Present. She is the winner of the Bakeless Poetry Prize and recipient of two NEA literature fellowships. A member of the core faculty at the University of California, Riverside's Palm Desert Low-Residency MFA program, she lives and writes in Austin, Texas. Marno was born in Los Angeles, and went to boarding school at Phillips Academy in Massachussetts. She received a BA in Comparative Literature from Barnard College, Columbia University and an MFA in Acting at the Yale School of Drama. Marno received rave reviews for the one-woman show Nine Parts of Desire in which she portrayed nine different Middle Eastern women which ran at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre and at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles.