Barbara Roether is a writer and teacher who can hear the ocean from where she lives San Francisco. Her debut novel This Earth You’ll Come Back To, was awarded an Independent Press Award, as well as being a finalist for the Ohioana Award and the Foreword INDIE awards. She has lived and worked in Morocco and Indonesia and is currently at work on a script about Raden Kartini, the early Javanese feminist. She is the author of a poetry chapbook The Middle Atlas, and recently completed a new poetry collection Saraswati’s Lament. Before teaching she worked in book publishing as an editor and freelance writer. Her book reviews appear periodically in The New York Journal of Books.