Leonard Kress is the author of The Centralia Mine Fire and has received grants in poetry and playwriting from the Pennsylvania and Ohio Councils on the Arts and the Polish Ministry of Higher Education. His poetry, prose, and translations have appeared in many journals including American Poetry Review, Missouri Review, Massachusetts Review, Quarterly West, and New Letters. He studied Religion at Temple University, Slavic Languages at Indiana University and the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and poetry at Columbia University. Kress currently lives in northwest Ohio where he teaches art history, religion, writing, and literature at Owens College.