Anne-Marie Cusac is the author of SILKIE (Many Mountains Moving, 2007). Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, The American Scholar, The Madison Review, and Crab Orchard Review. Her first poetry book, The Mean Days (2001) was published by Tia Chucha Press and won the Posner Book Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. A recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and a Wisconsin Arts Board Individual Artist's grant, Cusac was for ten years an editor and investigative reporter for The Progressive magazine. Her investigative reporting there won several awards, including the prestigious George Polk Award. She is a professor in Communication at Roosevelt University and a contributing writer for The Progressive. Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America (Yale University Press, 2009) is her new nonfiction book.
