Deni Bechard's first novel, Vandal Love, won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. He has also authored a memoir,Cures for Hunger, and written for a number of magazines and newspapers, among them theLos Angeles Times, Salon, Outside, the National Post,VQR, Maisonneuve, Le Devoir, the Harvard Review, and theHarvard Divinity Bulletin. He has been a fellow at MacDowell, Jentel, the Edward Albee Foundation, Ledig House, the Anderson Center, and Vermont Studio Center, among others. He has done freelance reporting from Northern Iraq as well as from Afghanistan, and he has traveled in more than fifty countries.