Martha Southgate is the author of four novels. The Taste of Salt was named one of the best novels of 2011 by the San Francisco Chronicle and The Boston Globe. Her previous novel, Third Girl from the Left, won the Best Novel of the Year award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She’s also the author The Fall of Rome and Another Way to Dance, which won the Coretta Scott King Genesis Award for Best First Novel. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her July 2007 essay from the New York Times Book Review, “Writers Like Me”, received considerable notice and appears in the anthology Best African-American Essays 2009. Previous non-fiction articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, O Magazine, Premiere, and Essence.