Leilani Hall received her M.A. in creative writing from Ohio University and her Ph.D. from the University of Southern Mississippi Center for Writers. She is currently Assistant Professor of English at California State University Northridge, where she teaches creative writing and theories of poetry. She taught at Ohio University, Marietta College, Colegio Roosevelt/The American School of Lima, and was visiting writer at the International School of Bebek, Turkey. She is a recipient of the Jane Kenyon Prize for Poetry.

About Swimming the Witch:

"Leilani Hall surprises with her unforced ability to write in the presence of female archetypes: the masks that both imprison and free us. What one of Hall's women says to another also describes this book: the poems 'are beautiful' . . . 'beautiful like a thin blade of grass."
—Angela Ball