Laura van den Berg was raised in Florida and earned her MFA at Emerson College. She is the recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences, the 2009 Julia Peterkin Award, the 2009-2010 Emerging Writer Lectureship at Gettysburg College, and the 2010-2011 Tickner Fellowship at the Gilman School. Formerly an assistant editor at Ploughshares, Laura is currently a fiction editor at West Branch and the assistant editor of Memorious, an online journal of new verse and fiction. She has taught writing at Emerson College, Gettysburg College, Grub Street, and in PEN/New England's Freedom to Write Program. Her fiction has appeared in One Story, Boston Review, Epoch, American Short Fiction, StoryQuarterly, Conjunctions, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008, Best New American Voices 2010, and The Pushcart Prize XXIV: Best of the Small Presses, among other publications. The winner of the Dzanc Prize, Laura's first collection of stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, was published by Dzanc Books in October 2009 and was a Holiday Pick for the Barnes & Noble "Discover Great New Writers" Program, longlisted for the Story Prize, and shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor Award. She is the 2010-2011 Tickner Fellow in Creative Writing at the Gilman School and currently lives in Baltimore, where she is at work on new stories and a novel.