Malinda McCollum is the author of The Surprising Place, winner of the 2017 Juniper Prize in Fiction. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Zyzzyva, and Epoch, and been anthologized in The Paris Review Book of People with Problems and The Worst Years of Your Life. McCollum is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Stegner fellowship at Stanford University. She earned an M.A. at the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She teaches fiction and academic writing at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC.