A native New Yorker, Susan Jane Gilman is journalist and fiction writer. She has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Ms., Us, The Village Voice, The New York Observer, Lilith, and Washington City Paper, among others. Her work has also appeared in the anthologies "Adios, Barbie/Body Outlaws:Young Women Write About Body Image and Identity" and "Sex & Single Girls." (Seal Press)

In recent years, Gilman has done radio commentaries for World News Radio in Washington, D.C. and penned a bi-monthly humor column for a young women's magazine, HUES, of which she was also an editor-at-large. At her first job, as a journalist for The Jewish Week newspaper, she received a New York Press Association Award for Feature Writing for articles she wrote on assignment in Poland, covering an educational program for teenagers learning about the Holocaust.

A fiction writer in her "other" life, Gilman has been published in Story, Ploughshares, The Beloit Fiction Journal, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Greensboro Review, which awarded her its 1997 Literary Award. She received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, where she received three Avery Hopwood Awards for fiction and nonfiction; a Cowden Memorial Fellowship; and the Gutterman Poetry Prize.

Gilman has also taught writing, literature, poetry, and drama at University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University. She has traveled the world extensively with a backpack, had ridiculous love affairs, and drunk a lot of medium-priced champagne. She currently lives in "rent exile" in Washington, D.C.