RICHARD GILES grew up in Mississippi, and for fifteen years worked as a farmer in Mississippi and Alabama. In the early 1980s, when the farm where he was employed began to fail, he attended Don Hendrie's fiction workshop at the University of Alabama. Since then, he has made a living through teaching, photography, and writing. For the past few years he has been residing in a small studio in downtown Birmingham with the artist Karen Graffeo and, until recently, with his eighteen-year-old son, Lincoln, a dancer-two people he considers as his community. He has published fiction in The Chariton Review, The Florida Review, and Story.