Lauren Goodwin Slaughter is a NEA Fellow in Poetry, the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and author of the poetry collection, a lesson in smallness. Her poems, essays, and short stories appear in Image, Harvard Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades, Kenyon Review Online, and 32 Poems, among other places. She is an associate professor of English at The University of Alabama at Birmingham where she is also Editor-in-Chief of NELLE, a literary journal that publishes writing by women.