"I wrote Tender Hooks because I wanted to figure out what I was experiencing. I wrote not to provide answers but to understand the questions. . . . When I was a child I misheard the word 'tenterhooks.' And this title I have chosen has proved apt." —Beth Ann Fennelly

:: Beth Ann Fennelly's first book, Open House, won the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize, and was a BookSense Top Ten poetry pick. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Breadloaf Writers' Conference, and she was Diane Middlebrook Fellow at the University of Wisconsin. Fennelly is an assistant professor of English at the University of Mississippi and lives with her husband, the writer Tom Franklin, and their daughter, Claire, in Oxford, Mississippi.