Leslie Pietrzyk is the author of the novel Silver Girl, which Publishers’ Weekly called “profound, mesmerizing, and disturbing,” and the novels Pears on a Willow Tree and A Year and a Day. Her collection of unconventionally linked short stories, This Angel on My Chest, won the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She received a 2020 Pushcart Prize, and her fiction/essays are in many journals, including Ploughshares, Southern Review, Washington Post Magazine, Salon, Gettysburg Review, Hudson Review, The Sun, Arts & Letters, River Styx, and Cincinnati Review. She is a member of the core fiction faculty of the Converse low-residency MFA program in SC.