David Lawrence Morse is a fiction writer, playwright, and director of the Writing Program at Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs.  Originally from south Georgia, he studied in Russia after the collapse of communism, cleaned toilets in Yosemite, and taught English then lived on a rice farm in the foothills of Yamaguchi, Japan, before earning an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. His first collection of stories, The Book of Disbelieving, won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and was published by Sarabande Books.  His short fiction has also garnered the O. Henry Prize and the Calvino Prize and has appeared in numerous literary magazines.  His play Beethoven in Bed, about the the composer’s final years, was created originally with violinist Edward Dusinberre and is now being developed with director Mark Wing-Davey and the Brentano String Quartet.