Novelist and short story writer Susan Straight graduated from Amherst College in 1984. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of California in Riverside. Aquaboogie, her first collection of short stories, won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize and was one of Publishers Weekly's best paperbacks (1990). I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots was named one of 1992's best novels by both Publishers Weekly and USA Today. It was also a New York Times Notable Book.