Blanche McCrary Boyd is Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Connecticut College, as well as the author of four novels and a collection of essays. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1993-1994), a National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowship (1988), a Creative Writing Fellowship from the South Carolina Arts Commission (1982-1983), a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing from Stanford University (1967-1968), the Lambda Literary Award (1991), and the Ferro-Grumley Award (1991). She is influenced by the state she was born in, South Carolina, and her work is often set in the South where her plots focus on gender confusion.