Billie Travalini received her M.A. in fiction in 1987. Her memoir, Bloodsisters, was a finalist for the Bakeless Publication Prize and James Jones Prize and won the Lewis and Clark Discovery Prize and Delaware Press Association Award for nonfiction. In 2006, she wrote and photographed The Wilmington Senior Center: Fifty Years of Community. She has received Individual Artist Fellowships in fiction and poetry from The Delaware Division of the Arts. Her latest essay “Wholeness and the Short Story” was published in Writers on Writing: Short Story Writers and Their Art. She is a fiction editor for The Journal of Caribbean Literatures and director of the Delaware Literary Connection. She is editing an anthology of writing for children 12-18 in Delaware's  Dentention Centers. She is also working on a book of interviews of black writers and artists, and a book of interviews of blacks that lived in Delaware before 1950. She teaches at Lincoln University, Wilmington College, and the Boys and Clubs Pegasus ArtWorks program and does educational consulting in youth detention centers throughout Delaware. Her website is http://www.billietravalini.com