Marlys West received her MFA from the James A. Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. The University of Akron Press published her book, Notes for a Late-Blooming Martyr: Poems, in 1999. She was a 2002-2003 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, where she wrote the bulk of a novel, Missing Mr. Bird, and edited a new collection of poems, The Vanity that Comes with Opposable Thumbs, which is available to an interested publisher. This year West received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in poetry.