Michael Byers is the author of Long for This World (2003), winner of this year’s First Novelist Award from Virginia Commonwealth University, and The Coast of Good Intentions, a book of stories (1998), both from Houghton Mifflin. His work has been nominated for the PEN/Hemingway Prize and received the Sue Kaufman Award for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award, and his work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories (Houghton Mifflin, 1997, 2000) and The O. Henry Prize Stories (Anchor). A native of Seattle, he teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.