Born in Chicago, Illinois, and reared in Mobile, Alabama, Patricia Storace was educated at Columbia University and the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Dinner with Persephone, a travel memoir that won the Runciman Award; Heredity, a book of poems; and Sugar Cane: A Caribbean Rapunzel, a children’s book. She received the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1993. She has been a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and Condé Nast Traveler.