THE AUTHOR

ELLEN LITMAN grew up in Moscow, Russia, where she lived until 1992. After her family immigrated to the United States, she studied computers at the University of Pittsburgh and after graduation spent the next six years working as a software developer in Baltimore and Boston. She took her first writing class in the fall of in 1998. Three years later, she left Information Technology and went off to Syracuse to study writing. Since then, she's been writing and teaching.

Her fiction won first prize in the Atlantic Monthly 2003 Fiction Contest, and she's been awarded 2006 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, as well as fiction fellowships at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown and scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New American Voices 2007, Best of Tin House, Ontario Review, Triquarterly, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is now an Assistant Professor and the Associate Director of Creative Writing at the University of Connecticut.