ANDREW TOWLE was born in 1967 and grew up in River Forest, Ill., outside Chicago. Inspired by a modern verse class at Vassar College, he began writing poetry, and after receiving encouragement from professors, he submitted his work to small magazines. His first publication was in Poetry. Upon graduation, he received a W. K. Rose Fellowship from Vassar, as well as a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford. As a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, he started working on Nights of the Hunted, a novel-in-progress about a group of friends living in post-AIDS San Francisco. He has published in The Yale Review, Shankpainter, and Christopher Street, and has finished a manuscript of poems, The Dead Sea at Dinner. He lives in New York City.