CLARENCE MAJOR is a novelist, poet, and painter. His novels include Dirty Bird Blues; Such Was the Season, a Literary Guild selection; My Amputations, winner of the Western States Book Award; Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year; and One Flesh. He has contributed to the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Harvard Review, among dozens of other periodicals. He is the author of fifteen collections of poetry. A Fulbright Scholar, Major has won a National Book Award bronze medal, a National Council on the Arts Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and a PEN Oakland/Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award for excellence in literature. He was elected to the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2021. Major is a distinguished professor emeritus of twentieth-century American literature at the University of California, Davis.