Hilda Raz lives in Placitas, New Mexico and is currently the Series Editor for Poetry at the University of New Mexico Press. Prior to her recent move to New Mexico, she was the editor of the literary journal Prairie Schooner from 1987 to 2010 and is the founding director of the Prairie Schooner Book Prizes in poetry and short fiction published by the University of Nebraska Press. In 1993 she was named the first Luschei Professor and Editor in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska where she has worked intensively with graduate students in the Ph.D. program.

 

She has published thirteen books as a poet, nonfiction writer, and editor. Her current projects include a book of poems, List and Story and a nonfiction book about transitions. Raz received the Stanley W. Lindberg Award for Excellence in Literary Editing in 2010 and was a final judge for the National Poetry Series, and the 2012 PRAIRIE SCHOONER Book Prize in Poetry and also the 2013 PS Book Prize in Poetry. She is Poetry Editor for bosque (the magazine) as well as a member of the Board of Directors of Arbor Farm Press.

She is a past president of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs and has been a visiting writer at Stanford, The University of Tennessee, Harvard, Goucher, Middlebury, The Pennsylvania State University, Antioch University-Los Angeles, The University of Iowa, University of Florida, University of Alaska, SUNY-Binghamton, University of Colorado, and many others, as well as at MFA programs and writers’ conferences including Brockport, Bread Loaf, Writers at Work, Taos, University of Nebraska and elsewhere.

Aaron Raz Link is a writer, performer, teacher, and curator. He is the author of “What Becomes Me.” “Being a man, like being a woman, is something you have to learn,” Aaron Raz Link remarks. Few would know this better than the coauthor of What Becomes You, who began life as a girl named Sarah and twenty-nine years later began life anew as a gay man. Turning from female to male and from teaching scientist to theatre performer, Link documents the extraordinary medical, social, legal, and personal process involved in a complete identity change. Hilda Raz, a well-known feminist writer and teacher, observes the process as both an “astonished” parent and as a professor who has studied gender issues. All these perspectives come into play in this collaborative memoir, which travels between women’s experience and men’s lives, explores the art and science of changing sex, maps uncharted family values, and journeys through a world transformed by surgery, hormones, love, and . . . clown school. Combining personal experience and critical analysis, the book is an unusual—and unusually fascinating—reflection on gender, sex, and the art of living.