Nelly Rosario was born in the Dominican Republic & raised in Brooklyn, New York. She earned a Bachelor's in engineering from MIT & an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University. She has received numerous awards including a 1999 Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Fellowship, The Bronx Writers' Center Van Lier Literary Fellowship for 1999-2000, two National Arts Club Writing Fellowships, the 1997 Huston/Wright Award in Fiction & most recently she has been chosen as a "Writer on the Verge" by the Village Voice Literary Supplement for 2001. Rosario is published in the anthology Becoming American (Hyperion, 2000).