Gayle Brandeis is an award-winning author whose first book, Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write, has been adopted by writers worldwide. Gayle’s novel The Book of Dead Birds won Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize for Fiction in Support of a Literature of Social Change in 2002, and was published by HarperCollins. Her poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in dozens of magazines and anthologies, including Salon.com, Nerve.com, Hip Mama and The Oy of Sex: Jewish Women Write Erotica. Gayle’s second novel, Self Storage, will be published by Ballantine in January 2007. Gayle, who was named a Writer Who Makes a Difference by The Writer Magazine, is writer-in-residence for the Mission Inn Foundation’s Family Voices Project, and teaches writing throughout Southern California. She lives in Riverside, Calif., with her husband and their two children.