Katherine Soniat has taught at the University of New Orleans, Hollins University, and was a  faculty member of Virginia Tech for twenty years. Currently, Soniat teaches in the Great Smokies Writing Program at the  University of North Carolina at Asheville. She has published work in  several journals including the Poetry, The Nation, The Southern Review, and Antioch Review.  The Swing Girl was awarded the Oscar Arnold Young Award for the best collection of poetry by a North Carolina poet in 2011 by The Poetry Council of North Carolina. Earlier works, A Shared Life, earned the Iowa Prize and was selected by poet Mary Oliver for a Virginia Prize in Poetry; Notes of Departure was selected by Sonia Sanchez for the Camden Poetry Prize given by the Walt Whitman Center for the Arts and Humanities.