Janet Burroway is the author of plays, poetry, children's books, and seven novels, including The Buzzards, Raw Silk, Opening Nights, and Cutting Stone. Her textbook Writing Fiction, now in its fifth edition, is used in more than three hundred colleges and universities in the United States; a further text, Imaginative Writing, is due out in 2002. She is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor at Florida State University in Tallahassee.