Gilbert Sorrentino was born in Brooklyn (1929) and has lived there and in Manhattan for most of his life. He attended Brooklyn College and has held many different jobs, the longest one as an editor for Grove Press (1965-1970). He has taught writing courses at Columbia University, the Aspen Writer’s workshop, and Sarah Lawrence College. He has been a recipient of a grant from the Adriane Foundation, was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1973-74, and won a Creative Artists Public Service grant in 1975. Mr. Sorrentino has published several volumes of poetry, among them Corrosive Sublimate (Black Sparrow) and The Perfect Fiction (W.W.Norton). Among his other published work are two novels brought out by Pantheon––Steelwork and Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things. New Directions published his Splendide-Hotel, meditations on the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, written in the American tradition of William Carlos Williams, in 1973. Mr. Sorrentino was a frequent contributor to American Review and many magazines, and his work has appeared in the New Directions in Prose and Poetry anthology. He died in 2006.