Mark Haskell Smith is the author of the novels Moist (Grove Press) and Delicious (Atlantic Monthly Press) and Salty (Grove Press) which was a Book Sense Notable Book in 2007. His novels have been published in the UK (Atlantic Books), France (Editions Rivages Noir), Italy (Bompiani), Norway (Font Forlag), and Russia (AST). In addition he has worked extensively in film and television; his credits include the feature films Playing God (Touchstone Pictures, 1997) and the Brazilian film A Partilha (Columbia/TriStar/Globo Films, 2002) that won the Audience Award for Best Picture and the Crystal Lens Award for Best Screenplay at the Miami Brazilian Film Festival. He has also done uncredited work on such films as Anaconda, Excess Baggage, and Inspector Gadget among others, and created original pilots for ABC and CBS television. He is part of the core faculty at the University of California Riverside Palm Desert MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts program, on the faculty of the University of Nebraska MFA in Writing Program, and teaches novel writing at UCLA Extension’s Writers Program. He is a graduate of The Evergreen State College and has an MFA degree from the American Film Institute.