On Rebecca Soppe

Ms. Soppe's work is nuanced and vivid, distinguished by a strong voice, a bold, experimental style, and wonderfully long sentences. In "The Pantyhose Man," the narrator is the collective spirit of the women who answer phones at a large Midwestern hotel. What begins as a comic account of how these women contend with obscene phone calls becomes, in Ms. Soppe's hands, an urban myth of uncanny psychological resonance.

—David Leavitt, author of several novels and story collections, among them Family Dancing, The Lost Language of Cranes, While England Sleeps, and Arkansas. The recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA, Leavitt teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Florida.