Janet Kauffman grew up on a tobacco farm in Pennsylvania. She lives in Michigan, where she taught writing and mixed media at Eastern Michigan University for many years. She has published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including, most recently, Five on Fiction (Burning Deck Press), a collection of prose poems, and Trespassing: Dirt Stories and Field Notes (Wayne State University Press), a book containing half stories and half essays on the factory farm crisis in her watershed.