A Self-Portrait in the Year of the High Commission on Love

DAVID BIESPIEL is a contributor to The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Slate.He is the author of a dozen books, most recently, A Place of Exodus: Home, Memory, and Texas (about the rise and fall of his Jewish boyhood in Texas), and The Education of a Young Poet, which was selected a Best Books for Writers by Poets & Writers. Recipient of National Endowment for the Arts, Lannan, and Stegner fellowships, as well as two Oregon Book Awards, and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, he has twice been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Balakian citation. Biespiel has taught at Stanford University, University of Maryland, and Wake Forest University, in addition to other colleges and universities. He is Poet-in-Residence at Oregon State University where he teaches in the graduate Creative Writing Program, and he is founder of the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters.