Margot Livesey was born and grew up in the Scottish Highlands and now lives near Boston. She is the author of four novels, Eva Moves the Furniture, Homework, Criminals, Banishing Verona, and The Missing World, a collection of stories, Learning by Heart, and is the co-editor of Writing about Literature: An Anthology for Reading and Writing. Her stories have appeared in Story, American Short Fiction, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere, and she has received grants from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. Livesey has taught in numerous writing programs, including the Iowa Writer's Workshop, the University of California at Irvine, and most recently Emerson College, where she is the fiction editor of Ploughshares and a distinguished writer-in-residence. Her new novel, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, will be published in winter 2012.