Deb Olin Unferth is the author of six books, most recently, the novel Barn 8. Her fiction and essays have appeared in over fifty magazines and journals, including Harper's, the New York Times, The Paris Review, and Granta. She was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, a Creative Capital Fellowship for Innovative Literature, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell and Yaddo Foundations. A professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches for the Michener Center for Writers and the New Writers' Project, she also directs the Pen City Writers, a creative writing program at a south Texas penitentiary.