Patricia Averbach, a Cleveland native, is the former director of the Chautauqua Writers Center in Chautauqua, New York. She is the 2013 winner of the London-based Lumen/Camden Poetry Prize. As part of the prize, a poetry chapbook, Missing Persons, will be published late in 2013. Her previous work includes a memoir about her very early career as Anzia Yezierska s sixteen year old literary assistant, and an article about the Jewish community in a virtual world called Second Life. She holds a degree in speech pathology from Case Western Reserve University where she worked in a deaf nursery during the 1970s. She is married to Attorney Mark Averbach and is the mother of two grown daughters, Ann and Elana. This is her first novel.