Josip Novakovich moved from Croatia to the U.S. at the age of twenty. He has published a novel, April Fool’s Day (translated into ten languages), three story collections (Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust, Yolk, and Salvation and Other Disasters), three collections of narrative essays (e.g. Apricots from Chenobyl), and two books of practical criticism, one of which, Fiction Writer’s Workshop, was a book of the Month Selection several times. He has just completed a novel set in Russia and another collection of stories. His work was anthologized in Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize collection, and O. Henry Prize Stories. He has received the Whiting Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Ingram Merrill Award, and an American Book Award, and he has been a writing fellow of the New York Public Library. He has taught at the University of Cincinnati, Bard, Penn State, and now Concordia University in Montreal. In addition to being interested in the craft of writing fiction and nonfiction, and war stories and Eastern European and Balkan history and fiction, he has done research in literature written in English as a Second Language.