Maria Lioutaia was born in Moscow, lived for two decades in Toronto, and is now based in New York, where she’s a Goldwater Fellow in the MFA program at NYU. She was a Tin House scholar, a finalist for The Iowa ReviewAwards, and was on the longlist for the 2015, 2016, and 2018 CBC short story prize. Her fiction appears, or is forthcoming, in Tin House, Conjunctions, The Masters Review, and Cosmonauts Avenue . Her last name means “fierce” in Russian.