KAREN E.BENDER is the author of the story collections The New Order and Refund, a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction. She is also the author of the novels Like Normal People and A Town of Empty Rooms. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, Story, Harvard Review, The Yale Review, The Iowa Review, and other magazines. Her stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, and have won three Pushcart prizes. She has won grants from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the NEA. She has taught for numerous MFA programs, and is currently a Visiting Writer for the SUNY Stony Brook MFA in Creative Writing and on the Core faculty for the Alma College MFA program. She is Fiction editor of the literary magazine Scoundrel Time.
