Michael Blumenthal's is the author of seven previous books of poetry, most recently And published by BOA Editions in 2009. A graduate of Cornell Law School and formerly Director of Creative Writing at Harvard, he is the author of the memoir All My Mothers and Fathers (Harper Collins, 2002), and of Dusty Angel (BOA Editions, 1999). His novel Weinstock Among The Dying, which won Hadassah Magazine's Harold U. Ribelow Prize for the best work of Jewish fiction, has just been re-issued in paperback, and his collection of essays from Central Europe, When History Enters the House, was published in 1998. A frequent translator from the German, French and Hungarian and former psychotherapist, he spent a month in South Africa in May of 2007 working with orphaned infant chacma baboons at the C.A.R.E. foundation, an experience he has chronicled in Natural History and The Washington Post Magazine. His book-length account, "Because They Needed Me: " The Incredible Struggle of Rita Miljo To Save The Baboons of South Africa, will be published in Germany next year. Two of his other books, a collection of selected poems and a memoir, were also recently published in Germany and featured at The Frankfurt Book Fair in the fall of 2011. He is currently Visiting Professor of Law at The University of West Virginia College of Law.