Menu Menu Peter Trachtenberg is the author of 7 Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh and The Book of Calamities: Five Questions about Suffering and Its Meaning, winner of the 2009 Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Award. His honors include a Whiting Award, the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh.