Laura Marello is author of novels - finalist for the Paterson Prize in Fiction - The Tenants of the Hotel Biron, Maniac Drifter, and Gauguin's Moon; as well as story collection The Gender of Inanimate Objects - shortlisted for the Saroyan Prize in Literature - and poetry chapbook Balzac's Robe. She has been a Stegner Fellow, Fine Arts Work Center Fellow and recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Grant. She studied poetry with Ray Carver, and Black Mountain poet Edward Dorn, and fiction with Gil Sorrentino and Padma Hejmadi. She is currently working on a novel about San Francisco architect Julia Morgan.