Named Literary Laureate of San Francisco in 2004, Peter Plate is the author since 1990 of ten novels, including Police & Thieves, Angel of Catastrophe, Elegy Written on a Crowded Street, Soon the Rest Will Fall, and Dirty in Cashmere, the last nine published by Seven Stories Press. He taught himself to write fiction during eight years spent squatting in abandoned buildings, and is known as a spoken word artist for his eidetic memory. He can “read” aloud from his books without having a book in front of him to read from: he knows each one by heart. Plate lives and writes in the San Francisco area.