Tiphanie Yanique is the author of How to Escape from a Leper Colony. Her writing has won the 2011 BOCAs Prize for Caribbean Fiction, the Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. She has been listed by The Boston Globe as one of the sixteen cultural figures to watch out for and by the National Book Foundation as one of the “5 Under 35” (2010). Originally from the Virgin Islands, she is now a professor in the MFA program at The New School in Manhattan. (updated 4/2013)