Carole L. Glickfeld, a CODA (child of deaf adults), was born in Brooklyn and grew up in the Inwood section of Manhattan, attending P.S. 152, J.H.S. 52, George Washington High School. She graduated from City College of New York and is a Ph. D. program drop-out from Hunter College. She began writing in the 5th grade. "I must have been destined to be a fiction writer becauase the first story I recall writing is about a boy and his dog and I didn't know anything about either." A voracious reader, she wrote stories, poems, essays and even novels on her own ("really I was a closet writer"). She was a "salad girl" in the Catskill Mountains and, in New York, worked as an office temp and as a "contingent" (going from department to department) in Macy's. After moving to Seattle, she had a number of jobs in politics (coordinating campaign offices) and government (working for the State Legislature and the City of Seattle). While she was Director of the Mayor's Office for Senior Citizens in Seattle, a friend invited her to a writers' conference. "It was so inspiring that I reduced my office hours and quit not long after to become a full-time writer." Her first commercial story was "Out of the Lion's Belly," which appears in the best-selling anthology WHEN I AM AN OLD WOMAN, I SHALL WEAR PURPLE. Another commercial story was published in FIRST FOR WOMEN. "I'm more interested in literary fiction," she says; "characters that have depth, language that is fresh, stories that are not only plausible but which shed light on the human condition." A member of her writers' group asked if she had ever written a story about her background with deaf parents. That inspired a story she took to a workshop with Marilynne Robinson. "It had a terrible title but after Marilynne told the class that it's a story about what Ruthie's mother knows, I retitled it to 'What My Mother Knows.'" Robinson told Glickfeld that she should write more stories about the same characters. "I know good advice when I hear it," Glickfeld says. The stories became the collection USEFUL GIFTS, about a family with deaf parents and hearing children, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Fiction. Subsequently, she published numerous stories, essays and poems. Her novel SWIMMING TOWARD THE OCEAN (Knopf), about the lives and loves of an immigrant couple as told by their daughter over four decades from what she knows, using her imagination to fill in the gaps, won the Washington State Book Award. Glickfeld has taught creative writing in Michigan, Alaska and Washington State. Her day job now is working with people on their manuscripts, editing, coaching, critiquing. She loves all the arts, is a movie junkie (see her mini-reviews on her website: www.caroleglickfeld.com), and studies ballet.