Alison Townsend is the author of a collection of poetry, The Blue Dress (White Pine, 2003), and two chapbooks, What The Body Knows (Parallel Press, 2002) and, more recently, And Still The Music (Flume Press chapbook prize winner, 2007). Her new collection, Persephone In America, won this year’s Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition Award and will be published in 2009 by Southern Illinois University Press. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and lives on four acres of oak and prairie savanna in the farm country outside Madison.