A native of Macon, Georgia, Marjorie Becker learned Spanish in childhood, studied in Spain, and served in the Peace Corps in rural Paraguay. She holds a doctorate from Yale and is the author of the price-winning Setting the Virgin on Fire, THE MACON SEX SCHOOL (Tebot Bach, 2020), the forthcoming Dancing on the Sun Stone: Mexican Women and the Gendered Politics of Octavio Paz, and two previous poetry collections, BODY BACH (Tebot bach, 2005) and PIANO GLASS/GLASS PIANO (Tebot Bach, 2010). She has won an array of awards including a Mellon Mentoring Award and a Faculty Fulbright Research Fellowship for Mexico. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthropologies. She is Associate Professor of History and of English at the University of Southern California. She lives in Santa Monica.