Jesse Lee Kercheval, the Sally Mead Hands Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, directs the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She is the author of a variety of award-winning books, including a memoir, a short story collection, a novel, a textbook, and the poetry collection World as Dictionary.

About Dog Angel:

"Kercheval is a poet unafraid of the universal questions of how we came to be and what we do once on this earth and in these bodies. Dog Angel shows us the world's rough and refined beauty and challenges us to learn from it, in language that encompasses both song and joke, and is always finely tuned to both the real world and any and all worlds beyond it."
—Allison Joseph

"Juxtaposing American pop culture and European tradition, [Kercheval] takes readers to the Zippo Museum and the Prado, to a college town where 'everyday we slouched / toward this Bethlehem of lunch counters.' Kercheval's imagination torques language; she elegizes human innocence ('golden in a marzipan of calm') and critiques the experiences of adult child, artist, parent."
—Robin Becker