Richard McCann is the author, most recently, of Ghost Letters (Alice James Books, 1994), the winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award and the Capricorn Poetry Award, and the editor (with Michael Klein) of Things Shaped in Passing: More "Poets for Life" Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. His fiction, poems, and memoirs have appeared in such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, and Tin House, and in numerous anthologies, including The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories (reprinted in 1994), Body (Avon, 1999), and Best American Essays 2000 (Houghton Mifflin). For his work, he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright and Rockefeller Foundations, The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he now serves on the Board of Trustees. McCann is co-director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at American University in Washington, D.C. The story published here is from the forthcoming Mother of Sorrows (Pantheon, April 2005).  

Photo by Gysbert Menninga