Jayne Benjulian has always been a reader and writer. She grew up in suburban backyards near New York City and spent summers swimming in the Atlantic Ocean. Drawn to coastlines, she also lived on the West Coast—on an island, in a cabin in the hills, and a house under the redwoods. She began writing as a young girl, leaving letters under the mattress to read years later and see who she had been. Five Sextillion Atoms is her first collection. Her poems and essays appear in numerous journals, including Agni, Barrow Street, Poet Lore, Nimrod, the online performance journal HowlRound, Women’s Review of Books, Women = Books blog and Poetry Daily. Jayne’s careers have been as varied and many as places she has lived: she served as chief speechwriter at Apple, investigator for the public defender in King County, Washington, and director of new play development at Magic Theater. She was an Ossabaw Island Project Fellow; a teaching fellow at Emory University; a lecturer in the Graduate Program in Theater at San Francisco State University; and a Fulbright Teaching Fellow in Lyon, France. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. She lives in Massachusetts and hikes the Berkshire Hills with her long-haired German shepherd, Ophelia, but she misses her big, brash Pacific Ocean. Find out more about Jayne and her work at www.jaynebenjulian.com.