P. H. Liotta was Professor of Humanities and Executive Director of the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, Salve Regina University, Newport, Rhode Island. He was the author of the memoir Learning to Fly: A Season With the Peregrine Falcon; Rules of Engagement, a collection of poems; Diamond’s Compass, a novel of Iran; and The Ruins of Athens: A Balkan Memoir. He was a former Fulbright Artist-in-Residence (Slobodan umjetnik) in Yugoslavia and NEA Fellow in Poetry. His recent travels took him back to former Yugoslavia and throughout the Balkans, the Middle East, Central and Southwest Asia, and the nations of the former Soviet Union. He received the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America for poems in this volume. He died in a car accident in Newport, RI on August 31, 2012