Elizabeth Kadetsky is the author of a memoir (First There Is a Mountain, Little Brown) and a novella (On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World, Nouvella Books). Her short stories have been chosen for a Pushcart Prize, Best New American Voices, and two Best American Short Stories notable citations, and her personal essays have appeared in The New York Times, Guernica, Santa Monica Review, Antioch Review, Post Road, Agni, and elsewhere. She has traveled to Guatemala as a journalist covering the underground adoption trade for the Village Voice, to Southern Mexico covering the war in Chiapas for The Nation, to Malta as a creative writing fellow at the St James Cavalier Centre for Creativity, and to Spain and France as a fellow in the arts at Camargo Foundation, Funadción Valparaiso, Fondation La Napoule, and elsewhere. She studied Arabic in Morocco and as a research scholar at the Center for Forced Migration Studies at American University in Cairo, and she was a Fulbright fellow to India in creative writing. She is assistant professor of fiction and nonfiction at Penn State University.