Malinda McCollum is the author of The Surprising Place, winner of the Juniper Prize for Fiction and a finalist for the L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review – which awarded her the Plimpton Prize – McSweeney’s, ZYZZYVA, Epoch, StoryQuarterly, and elsewhere. Her stories have been anthologized in The Paris Review Book of People with Problems, The Pushcart Prize XXVIII, and The Worst Years of Your Life: Stories for the Geeked-Out, Angst-Ridden, Lust-Addled, Deeply Misunderstood Adolescent in All of Us.

After graduating from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she received a Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship at Stanford University. She’s worked at the University of Iowa, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford, and currently is an assistant professor at the College of Charleston, where she teaches in the MFA and undergraduate creative writing programs and serves as Nonfiction Editor at Crazyhorse.