Gail Gilliland graduated with a BA in French and Italian from the University of California-Berkeley, and later received a Masters in English from the University of New Mexico, and an MFA in fiction and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.  Her stories and poems have appeared in a number of journals.  Her jobs have included corporate writing and newspaper work.  She lives near Boston and has published a collection of stories, "The Demon of Longing" (Carnegie Mellon University Press) and a poetics,"Being A Minor Writer" (University of Iowa Press).