Joseph Maiolo was born in West Virginia, was raised in the Cumberland Mountains of southwestern Virginia, and has degrees from the University of Virginia (M.A.), the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (M.F.A.), and the United States Naval Academy (B.S.). He is presently a professor of English at the University of Minnesota Duluth, where he has taught literature and fiction writing since 1976. His short stories have been published in The Sewanee Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, other magazines, and anthologies. Several of his stories and a novella have won national awards, including citation in The Best American Short Stories, a Pushcart Prize, three PEN/Syndicated Fiction Awards (two of the three stories read on National Public Radio), and two National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellowships. Maiolo's work has also received a 1999 Bush Artist Fellowship and a Loft-McKnight Award of Distinction in Fiction. "The Girl and the Serpent," an excerpt from his memoir in progress, was published in 2001 by Beacon Press in Resurrecting Grace: Remembering Catholic Childhoods. Maiolo has just completed a novel and assembled a collection of his short stories.