Amy Beeder is the author of Burn the Field and Now Make An Altar (Carnegie Mellon University Press). A recipient of an NEA Fellowship, a "Discovery"/The Nation Award and a James Merrill Fellowship, she has worked as a creative writing instructor, freelance writer, reporter, political asylum specialist, sous-chef, high-school teacher in West Africa, and an election and human rights observer in Haiti and Suriname. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, AGNI, The Southern Review and many other journals. She lives in Albuquerque.