Peter Trachtenberg is the author of Another Insane Devotion: On the Love of Cats and Persons; 7 Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh; and The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning, which won the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s 2009 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award. He’s currently at work on The Last Artists in New York, a group biography of New York’s Westbeth arts community that’s also a meditation on the predicament of the arts in the late capitalist metropolis. It will be published by Black Sparrow in 2023. His honors include the Whiting Award, the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, a Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and residencies at Yaddo and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Centre. He teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and the Bennington Writing Seminars.