Amy Gerstler is a writer of poetry, nonfiction and journalism who lives in Los Angeles. She is the author of ten previous poetry collections, including Bitter Angel, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Crown of Weeds, which won a California Book Award. Her most recent collection, Scattered at Sea (2015), was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and several volumes of Best American Poetry. She teaches in the graduate fine arts department at Art Center, College of Design, in Pasadena, California, and is a member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program at Bennington College in Vermont.