Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is the recipient of several awards, including an award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Alan Collins Poetry Fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her first book, The Gospel of Barbecue (Kent State, 2000), won the 1999 Wick Prize for Poetry. Her second book of poetry is Outlandish Blues, (Wesleyan, 2003). Her third book of poetry, Red Clay Suite, was chosen by Dorianne Laux for the second prize in the 2006 Crab Orchard Open Competition and is forthoming in Spring 2007 from Southern Illinois University Press. Her poems have been published in several journals including American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. A fiction writer as well, her stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, New England Review and Story Quarterly. A native Southerner, she now lives on the prairie where she is an Assistant Professor of English at The University of Oklahoma.