Blanche McCrary Boyd has taught at Connecticut College since 1982. She has written four novels—Terminal Velocity, The Revolution of Little Girls, Mourning the Death of Magic, and Nerves—as well as a collection of essays, The Redneck Way of Knowledge. Among the awards Boyd has won are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowship, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the South Carolina Arts Commission, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing from Stanford University.