About the Author
Steven Nightingale
Steven Nightingale is an author of books of poetry, novels, and essays. He divides his time between the San Francisco Bay Area; Reno, Nevada; and Granada, Spain. Personal and Family LifeNightingale was born in Reno, Nevada, and attended public schools there before being admitted to Stanford University, where he studied literature, religion, and computer science. He has lived near London, in Paris, and in Granada, Spain, and traveled worldwide, often to wild country. He moved to Granada in 2001, after buying, with his wife Lucy Blake, a carmen in the ancient barrio of the Albayzin. He and Lucy have one daughter, Gabriella. WritingNightingale is the author of two novels, six books of sonnets, and a travel and history book about Granada. His work is widely anthologized, and he has taught poetry by invitation in over fifty schools and universities in Nevada and California. His first poetry was published in 1983, by the magazine Coevolution Quarterly, and his first novel, The Lost Coast, and its sequel, The Thirteenth Daughter of the Moon, were published by St. Martin's Press in New York, in 1995 and 1996. Following those books, he began to assemble into manuscripts his sonnets, a poetic form with an eight-hundred year history. Nightingale specialized in the sonnet, believing that its history and durability give the form a straightforward and uncanny power. His six books of poetry begin with the limited edition Cartwheels, followed by the trade edition Planetary Tambourine, and four more collections of ninety-nine sonnets each, all published by the Black Rock Press, in their Rainshadow Editions. In 2015, Counterpoint Press in Berkeley, California brought out Granada: A Pomegranate in the Hand of God. The book describes the move of the author and his family to Granada, and goes on to address the history of gardens and of the Albayzin, the extraordinary history of Al-Andalus, the sacred geometry in Islamic tile work, the work of the Sufis, the history of flamenco, and the life and poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca.