Antonya Nelson was born in 1961 in Wichita, Kansas. After earning her M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 1986, her story "The Expendables" was selected by Raymond Carver as a first-prize winner for the journal American Fiction in 1988. A collection by the same title won the Flannery O'Connor Award and was published in 1990, followed by two more story collections, In the Land of Men (1992) and Family Terrorists (1994). She then published three novels, Talking in Bed (1996), Nobody's Girl (1998), and Living to Tell (2000), and returned to stories with Female Trouble (2002). For this work, among many other honors, she has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Rea Award for the Short Story, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the "twenty young fiction writers for the new millennium" and by Granta as among the "best of the young American novelists." In addition to writing, Nelson also teaches, dividing her time between New Mexico State University and the University of Houston, where she shares a chair with her husband, the writer Robert Boswell. Her latest offering, Some Fun, is a collection of stories forthcoming in March 2006.