Susan Straight

has published eight novels, including Highwire Moon and A Million Nightingales. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and received the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement from the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, the O. Henry Prize, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Straight’s essays have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, Granta, and The Believer. She was born in Riverside, California, where she lives with her family.