Karen Brown is the author of the novel The Longings of Wayward Girls and two short story collections—Little Sinners and Other Stories, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the John Gardner Book Award, and Pins and Needles: Stories, recipient of the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction. Her second novel, The Clairvoyants, is forthcoming from Holt in 2017. Her work has appeared in journals including The New York Times, Good Housekeeping, The Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, Epoch, and The Georgia Review, and in the anthologies Best American Short Stories and two editions of The O. Henry Prize Stories. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of South Florida.