Joseph Skibell's debut novel, A Blessing on the Moon, received the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Turner Prize for First Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters. A Book of the Month Club selection, the novel was named one of the year's best books by Publishers Weekly, Le Monde and Amazon.Com, and has been translated into half a dozen languages. The novel is currently being adapted into an opera. His second novel, The English Disease, received the Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Book of Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters. A Curable Romantic is his third novel. A recipient of a Halls Fiction Fellowship, a Michener Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Skibell is a professor at Emory University and the director of the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature. He has been invited to give the inaugural reading in the Jewish Literature Series at the University of Pennsylania. (Photo by Jeffrey Allen)