George Looney is the author of three previous award-winning fiction collections—a novella, Hymn of Ash, a novel, Report from a Place of Burning, and a story collection, The Worst May Be Over—as well as thirteen collections of poetry, several of which won national awards. And he has edited the forthcoming posthumous book, The Ceremony of Opening the Mouth: The Poetry and Prose of Douglas Smith, to be published by Hermit Feathers Press of North Carolina. He is Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at Penn State Erie, where he founded a BFA in Creative Writing Program which he chaired for over ten years, and where he is Editor of the international literary journal Lake Effect. He also serves as Translation Editor of Mid-American Review, which he was Editor-in-Chief of in the 1990s. He has a BFA in Art Education from the University of Cincinnati, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University. In addition to Penn State Erie, where he has taught for the last twenty-three years, he has taught at Bowling Green State University, where he revised the BFA program which he was in charge of for several years, and at several colleges and universities in Chicago: Columbia College, Loyola University, and Roosevelt University.