Patricia Foster is the author of All the Lost Girls (University of Alabama Press, 2002) (PEN/Jerard Award), Just beneath My Skin (essays), Girl from Soldier Creek (University of Georgia Press, 2004) (SFA Fiction Award) and the editor of the anthology Understanding the Essay (with Jeff Porter) (Broadview Press, 2012). She is the recipient of the 2017 Clarence Cason Award for nonfiction and the Theodore Hoepfner Award for the essay. She has been a professor in the MFA Program in Nonfiction at the University of Iowa for over twenty years and has taught in France, Australia, Czech Republic, Italy, and Spain.