M.G. Stephens is the author of eighteen books, including the novels
The Brooklyn Book of the Dead and Season at Coole; the play Our Father,
which was revived last year in London; and the nonfiction books Lost in
Seoul, Green Dreams, and Where the Sky Ends. Mick lives in London,
is the director of the MA in creative writing at Kingston University in Surrey,
England, and is finishing up a PhD thesis on the St. Mark's in the Bowery
Poetry Project and its influences at the University of Essex in Colchester,
England. His essay is drawn from that thesis. Some of his other recent
work includes essays and stories in Witness, Boston Review, the Review
of Contemporary Fiction and Foreign Policy. He recently completed the
third novel in the Coole family saga, this new one called Kid Coole, and
has been writing a book of sonnets for several years now, as well as
writing a nonfiction book about living in England after 9/11, and also
surviving one of the tube explosions on July 7th this year, being on
the train in front of where the Edgware Road bomb went off.