Martha Southgate is the author of four novels: The Taste of Salt, Third Girl From The Left, The Fall of Rome and Another Way to Dance. Her work has won numerous accolades and she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her nonfiction work has appeared in many venues, among them The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Entertainment Weekly. She has seen Hamilton eight times (so far), wrote about its transformative effect in the essay “Rise Up” for The American Scholar. She is a second-year student in the MFA in Playwriting program at Brooklyn College.