Colette LaBouff Atkinson is the author of Mean, a collection of prose poems (University of Chicago Press 2008). Her prose has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Seneca Review, Santa Monica Review, Orange Coast Magazine, Babble, and elsewhere. She is currently Associate Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at UC Irvine, lives in southern California, and spent the better part of this past year listening to Mitchell's "The Tea Leaf Prophecy" from Herbie Hancock's River: The Joni Letters.