Noy Holland is the author of The Spectacle of the Body (Knopf), which was nominated for a National Book Award. Her second collection of stories, What Begins With Bird, is forthcoming in September 2005, from Fiction Collective Two. Her stories have appeared in The Quarterly, Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Open City, Noon, and others. She is an Associate Professor in the MFA Program for Writers and Poets at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she directs the Writers in the Schools Project. She was a finalist for a Massachusetts Cultural Council Award in 2002, and received an NEA in 2003.