Brenda Shaughnessy Brenda Shaughnessy was born in 1970 in Okinawa, Japan, and grew up in Southern California. She received her B.A. in literature and women’s studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and earned an M.F.A. at Columbia University’s Writing Division. She is the author of Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus &; Giroux, 1999), which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Her other honors include an Emerging Artist’s award from the Greenwall Foundation and NYU’s Institute for Advanced Study, a Creative Artist’s Fellowship from the Japan/U.S. Friendship Commission, and a Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She currently lives in Brooklyn.

September 12th, 2006