A native of Toms River NJ, Noël Valis has lived in New Haven CT for the last sixteen years and teaches at Yale University. She writes on modern Spanish literature, culture, and history, with books on the Spanish Civil War, bad taste and class in modern Spain, and religion and literature. A Guggenheim and NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) Fellow, she is the author of twenty-five books, including The Culture of Cursilería: Bad Taste, Kitsch and Class in Modern Spain (Duke University Press), which won the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize. Her translations include the poetry of Noni Benegas (Burning Cartography [Host Publications]), winner of the New England Council of Latin American Studies Best Book Translation Prize. She has also written a book of poetry, My House Remembers Me (Esquío), and a novella, The Labor of Longing (Main Street Rag Publishing), which was a Finalist for the Prize Americana for Prose and a Finalist in two categories, Novella and Regional Fiction, of the Next Generation Indie Book Awards.