I first read Medea when I was an undergraduate at Stanford, in a year-long Great Works of Western Literature course (the final year it was offered). The instructor, Leslie Cahoon, was a classicist and feminist who shaped nearly all my future interests. Because of her I took a feminist thought workshop with Adrienne Rich, learned Latin and am currently translating Ovid, studied all of Chaucer’s works in graduate school, learned Old English and translated Beowulf, became interested in depictions of hell from Bede to Dante to Blake to McCarthy, and of course became influenced by the Greeks. My novels are all Greek tragedies, I’m a neoclassical writer, and it was a particular pleasure to try to bring Medea more fully to life after twenty-five years of thinking about her. So I want to thank Leslie for her enormous and lasting influence.

Thank you to archaeologist Cheryl Ward for inviting me to help build and then captain the reconstruction of one of Hatshepsut’s ships from 3,500 years ago. She was the one who held the project together, and that rich experience is the basis for all the descriptions of the Argo here.

I also want to thank John L’Heureux, as always, for more than twenty years of mentorship and for his sharp early read.

Huge thanks to Elisabeth Schmitz and Katie Raissian and others at Grove for having faith in this novel, which had been previously delayed. It was written four years ago and should have followed Goat Mountain as the culmination in style and content of a set of Greek tragedies about religion, so I’m very happy it can finally have a life.

And I’d like to thank my fabulous agents Kim Witherspoon, David Forrer, and Lyndsey Blessing at Inkwell and Rob Kraitt at Casarotto. Also Robin Robertson for his new and excellent translation of Medea from which I drew the title.