Eric Wertheimer is Professor of English and American Studies at Arizona State University and currently Associate Vice Provost for Graduate Programs. He is the author of Underwriting: The Poetics of Insurance in America (Stanford University Press, 2006) and Imagined Empires: Incas, Aztecs, and the New World of American Literature, 1771-1876 (Cambridge University Press, 1998). He has published his poems in a variety of journals over the past ten years; Mylar is his first book of poetry. His other ongoing book projects include: Pretexts: War and Writing in the Early Republic, and Within Trauma: Biopolitics, Poetics, Praxis (forthcoming from NYU Press).