Erica Anzalone is a writer and educator with over sixteen years of teaching experience at the college level. Her book Samsara was the winner of the 2011 Noemi Press Poetry Prize. In Samsara, she looks through a spiritual-historical lens at art, war, feminism, religion, and the body in extremis. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and a doctorate in English from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, where she was awarded a Schaeffer fellowship. Her work has appeared in The Colorado Review, Hotel Amerika, Cream City Review, Juked, Pangyrus, baldhip, Coconut, Denver Quarterly, The Literary Review, Greatcoat, Konundrum Engine Literary Review, Mary, The Offending Adam, Pleiades, Sentence, UCity Review, and elsewhere. Her second poetry manuscript explores the surrealism and simulacra of Las Vegas, and offers both a critique and celebration of American excess.