Askold Melnyczuk's most recent novel is Smedley's Secret Guide to World Literature. Other books include The House of Widows, an Editor's Choice selection of the American Library Association's Booklist, Ambassador of the Dead, a Los Angeles Times Best Book for 2002 and What is Told, a New York Times Notable Book. He has also published a novella about Rimbaud titled Blind Angel.He has published essays, reviews, poetry, and translations in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Glimmer Train, The Antioch Review, The Harvard Review, The Gettysburg Review,and elsewhere. His essays have twice been listed as"Notable Essays" in the Best American Essays (2008, 2010). He received a three-year fellowship in fiction from the Lila Wallace Foundation, as well as numerous grants from the NEA for his work as editor of AGNI magazine, which he founded in 1972. In 2001, Melnyczuk received the Magid Award from PEN which described AGNI as "one of America's, and the world's, most significant literary journals." He has also received the George Garret Award from AWP for his "service to literature."Melnyczuk, founder of Arrowsmith Press, has edited six books, including three volumes in Graywolf's Take Three Poetry Series, an anthology of writing from Ukraine, From Three Worlds, a volume on the painter Gerry Bergstein, and a book of essays about Father Daniel Berrigan. He translated Girls, a novella by Oksana Zabuzhko, Ukraine's leading novelist and poet, as well as a selection of poems, Eight Notes from a Blue Angel, by Marjana Savka.He has taught at Harvard University and currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston.