Maria Lioutaia was born in Moscow, and now lives and writes in Toronto. Her fiction appears in Ploughshares, One Story, Gulf Coast, Tin House, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Conjunctions, The Masters Review, and Cosmonauts Avenue. She was a Tin House scholar, a finalist for The Iowa Review Awards, and was on the longlist for the CBC Short Story Prize three times. She holds an MFA from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. Her last name means “fierce” in Russian.