The author of four previous books of poetry, Connie Wanek is an award-winning author and a Witter Bynner Fellow of the Library of Congress. Her most recent book is RIVAL GARDENS: New and Selected Poems from the University of Nebraska Press. Her work has been widely published in such journals as POETRY magazine and THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY. Poet and critic Stephen Burt has written: "Come to Wanek looking for inspiration and you may get what you seek, but you will also get sentences that end up sharper, more like parables (as in Kay Ryan) or like Solomonic wisdom." Louis Jenkins calls Wanek "one of the best poets of our time." Maxine Kumin praised earlier books, saying "Wanek is a natural..." and Linda Pastan said, "These are truly original poems, enriched by metaphor and lit by a hard won optimism." Novelist Charles Baxter wrote of Wanek's new and selected, RIVAL GARDENS: "Connie Wanek's beautiful poems travel effortlessly among our various realms-the human, the natural, and the cosmic, inhabited by gods who may have some resemblance to ourselves. The light is wonderfully clear in these accounts, as is the darkness, each one illuminating the other."