Brenda Miller is the author of six essay collections, including A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form, Listening Against the Stone, and An Earlier Life, which received the Washington State Book Award for Memoir. Her work has received seven Pushcart Prizes. She co-authored, with Suzanne Paola, the textbook Tell it Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction and co-wrote, with Holly J. Hughes, The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World. She is Professor Emerita of Creative Writing at Western Washington University and lives in Bellingham, Washington.