Louis E. Bourgeois was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in the Slidell/LaCombe area, as well as East New Orleans on Bayou Sauvage. In 1996 he earned a B.A. from Louisiana State University in English and in 2002 was the first graduate of The University of Mississippi’s MFA program in creative writing. He has published translations, fiction, memoirs, poetry, and interviews in over two hundred magazine and journals in North America, Europe, and Asia. In 2004, he was the winner of the University of Milwaukee’s Cream City Review’s poetry contest for his poem “The Shed: The Daughter of Shadows Speaks from Max Beckmann’s The Dream (1921).” Other awards include, The Robert Penn Warren Award, the Common Ground Review’s poetry award, an Excellence Award from the Dana Literary Society, three Editor’s Choice Awards, four Pushcart nominations, as well as an artist grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission. Bourgeois’ books include, Through the Cemetery Gates, The Distance of Ducks, The Animal, Cora Falling Off the Face of the Earth, White Night, Fragments of a Life Thirty-two Years Gone, OLGA and a forthcoming collection of short prose, The Gar Diaries. In 2006, his poetry was accepted for inclusion in Scrivener’s Best American Poetry 2007. Bourgeois is also co-founder and editor of VOX, an independent experimental literary journal based in Oxford, Mississippi.