Keija Parssinen is the author of the novels The Ruins of Us, which won a Michener-Copernicus Award and was long-listed for the Chautauqua Prize; and The Unraveling of Mercy Louis, which earned an Alex Award from the American Library Association and was selected as a Best Book of 2015 by the Kansas City Star. Her writing has appeared in several Lonely Planet travel writing anthologies, Slice magazine, Salon, Five Chapters, Off Assignment, the New Delta Review and elsewhere, and she has earned fellowships from Yaddo, the Vermont Studio Center, the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, and the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow, she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Tulsa and directs the Pan-European MFA Program at Cedar Crest College.