Gardner McFall is the author of The Pilot’s Daughter (Time Being Books). She is also the editor of Made with Words, a prose miscellany, by May Swenson (University of Michigan Press), the author of two children’s books, Jonathan’s Cloud (Harper & Row) and Naming the Animals (Viking), and the librettist for Amelia, an opera commissioned by Seattle Opera, with music by Daron Hagen. Ms. McFall, who has received a “Discovery”/ The Nation award and the Missouri Review’s Thomas McAfee Prize for Poetry, earned her master’s degree from the Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University and her doctorate, in English, from New York University. She lives in New York City and teaches at Hunter College.