During the Reign Of the Queen Of Persia

Joan Chase was born and raised in Ohio. She graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in philosophy and history and later enrolled in the Writing Workshop of the University of Vermont. After being turned down by several publishers, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia was released by Harper & Row in 1983 and went on to win numerous prizes, including the PEN / Hemingway Foundation Award for first fiction by an American writer. Chase is also the author of the novel The Evening Wolves (1990) and the story collection Bonneville Blue (1991). She lives in Massachusetts.Meghan O’Rourke, a former editor at The New Yorker and Slate, is the author of the poetry collections Once and Halflife and a memoir, The Long Goodbye. Her poetry and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the inaugural May Sarton Poetry Prize, and teaches at NYU and Princeton.