Jesse Lee Kercheval is a poet, fiction writer and memoirist whose books include the bilingual Spanish/ English poetry collection Extranjera / Stranger; the poetry collection Cinema Muto, winner of a Crab Orchard Open Selection Award; The Alice Stories, winner of the Prairie Schooner Fiction Book Prize; the poetry collection Dog Angel; the memoir Space, winner of the Alex Award from the
American Library Association; and the short story collection The Dogeater, winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award for Short Fiction. She is also a translator, specializing in the poetry of
Uruguay. She is currently Zona Gale Professor of English and Director of the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

America that island off the coast of France hurtles across literary and linguistic borders, toward a lyricism that slows down experience to create a new form of elegiac memoir. Born in France, raised in Florida, Jesse Lee Kercheval now divides her time between the U.S. and Uruguay. Her poems speak to the impossibility of emigration, of ever being the citizen of only one country. Against the backdrops of Paris, Montevideo, and Florida, these poems explore citizenship and homelessness, motherhood and self, family and freedom. As the poems go from one place to another, they also connect places together; they mirror and combine images, imitate other poets and draw out long, original lines of reflecting and describing. Kercheval turns over and over again the very meaning of the word home, as the poems, like the poet, make the fraught journey back and forth between places like France and America. Even though places might be similar, or a poet might connect them, Kercheval still wonders, in her poem "The Red Balloon": "is leaving / ever painless? Is returning?"