A native of San Francisco, Gretchen E. Henderson writes across genres and the arts to invigorate her critical and creative practices. Her newest book is Ugliness: A Cultural History (just out from Reaktion Books of London/University of Chicago Press). Her other books include two novels, The House Enters the Street (Starcherone Books, 2012, finalist for the AWP Award Series in the Novel and the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award) and Galerie de Difformité (&NOW Books, winner of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Prize, also a Nobbie Best Book of 2011), as well as a critical volume about literary appropriations of music and silence, On Marvellous Things Heard (Green Lantern Press, 2011), and a poetry chapbook engaging cartographic history, Wreckage: By Land & By Sea (Dancing Girl Press, 2011).