Drake Stutesman is a radical literary novelist, a nonfiction writer, and the editor of Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media. She holds a doctorate from the University of Sussex  on the experimental writing of Susan Howe. Her cultural history of snakes, Snake (Reaktion Books), was published in 2005. She is working on a biography of milliner/couturier Mr John and on a second novel. She has traveled extensively in the Middle East.