Belle Boggs is the author of The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood and Mattaponi Queen, a collection of linked stories set along Virginia’s Mattaponi River. The Art of Waiting was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and was named a best book of the year by Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, the Globe and Mail, Buzzfeed, and O, the Oprah Magazine. Mattaponi Queen won the Bakeless Prize and the Library of Virginia Literary Award and was a finalist for the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Boggs has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences, and her stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, the Paris Review, Harper’s, Orion, Guernica, and other publications. She teaches in the MFA program at North Carolina State University.

The text of The Gulf is set in Arno Pro.

Book design by Rachel Holscher.

Composition by Bookmobile Design and Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free, 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.