Dan Stryk is the author of seven collections of poems and prose parables, including The Artist and the Crow (Purdue University Press, 1984), and most recently, Solace of the Aging Mare (The Mid-America Press, 2007). Dimming Radiance, a new cross-cultural collection of Far Eastern and Western philosophic and naturalistic concepts, is forcthcoming from Wind Publications in 2008. His favorite pastime is walking with his wife in the Blue Ridge foothills,near his home in Bristol, Virginia, while turning over logs to look for salamanders.