Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Brief History of the Dead and The Truth About Celia, the children's novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery, and the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer. He has published stories in The New Yorker, The Georgia Review, McSweeney's, Zoetrope, The Oxford American, The Best American Short Stories, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and the O. Henry: Prize Stories anthology. He has received the Borders Original Voices Award, the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, an Italo Calvino Short Fiction Award, a James Michener-Paul Engle Fellowship, three O. Henry Awards (one, a first prize), the PEN USA Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA Grant. Recently he was named one of Granta magazine's Best Young American Novelists. His work has been translated into fifteen languages. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was raised.