Catherine Sasanov received an National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1997 and has had residencies at the MacDowell and the Vermont Studio Center. She is the author of Had Slaves (Firewheel Editions, 2009), All the Blood Tethers (Northeastern University Press, 2002), Traditions of Bread & Violence (Four Way Books, 1996). The Mabou Mines Theater Company commissioned her to write Las Horas de Belén: A Book of Hours, a play about a 17th-century Mexican women’s sanctuary and prison.