Acknowledgments

Thanks to my friends and all the “six o’clock” readers along the way: Kate Hill Cantrill, John Greenman, Elena Eidelberg, Sarah Johnson, Amy Lowrey, Arthur Lee, Alexander Parsons, Mike Yang, Amanda Eyre Ward, and Katherine Tanney.

Thanks to David Meeker for digging Nina Simone’s song “Four Women” out of his record collection and playing it for me.

Thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts for much-needed and appreciated support.

Thanks to Jennifer Carlson and Megan Hustad for reading intuitively and taking the time to pay attention to subtle rhythms.

And thanks to my mother, again and always, for setting me on this path.