Amy Gerstler is a writer of poetry, nonfiction and journalism. Penguin published Ghost Girl, her most recent book of poems, in 2004, and will publish her book Dearest Creature in October, 2009. Her previous twelve books include Medicine, Crown of Weeds, which won a California Book Award, Nerve Storm, and Bitter Angel, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, several volumes of Best American Poetry and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry. In the late 1980s through the mid 1990s she contributed monthly reviews to Artforum magazine. She does a variety of kinds of journalism, including art criticism and book reviews, and has written for the Village Voice, Los Angeles Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Bookforum, Art and Antiques, and numerous other publications. She is a core faculty member at the Bennington Writing Seminars, Bennington College, Vermont. She has taught writing and/or art at the California Institute of the Arts, Art Center College of Design, Cal Tech, the University of California at Irvine, the University of Southern California, the University of Utah, Pitzer College, and elsewhere.