Mary Azrael, poet, teacher, and editor is the author of Victorians, Riddles for a Naked Sailor, and Black Windows, a hand-made book created for the Smith College Rare Book Collection. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Calyx, Chelsea, Harpers, Chattahoochee Review, Kansas Quarterly, Poetry Daily and elsewhere. During the past few years, she has been working on the libretto for "Lost Childhood", an opera based on the life of Holocaust survivor Yehuda Nir. American Opera Projects and the New York City Opera have presented unstaged readings of the opera. A full reading took place in New York on May 16–19, 2005. Azrael lives in Baltimore, where she teaches poetry writing at Johns Hopkins University School of Continuing Studies, and co-edits Passager Magazine, a national literary journal featuring the work of older writers.