Simone Muench is an associate editor for ACM. She was raised in Benson, Louisiana, and the Ozark Mountains in Combs, Arkansas, before moving to Colorado to receive her B.A. and M.A. She has poems forthcoming in Indiana Review, Bellingham Review, and River City. She is a recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship and has recently won the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry, the AWP Intro Journals Project Award, and the Poetry Center's 9th Annual Juried Reading. She was also named Listener's Choice in the WBEZ Illinois Poet Laureate Contest. Her book, The Air Lost in Breathing, received the 1999 Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry and was published by Helicon Nine Editons in 2000. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago where she just completed her manuscript, Drowning by the Light of Oranges.