KARIN LIN-GREENBERG is a Chinese American, award-winning writer whose debut collection, Faulty Predictions, won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and won gold in Foreword Reviews's INDIE Award in the Short Story category. Her second collection, Vanished, was the winner of the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Fiction. She is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Her fiction has appeared in publications including The Southern Review, Story, and Boulevard. Her short story "The Sweeper of Hair," the basis of this novel's opening chapter, was a finalist for the Nelson Algren Literary Award and was published in the Chicago Tribune. Lin-Greenberg is an associate professor in the English Department at Siena College in upstate New York.