Carole Burns, a freelance reviewer for the Washington Post, was the winner of Ploughshares’ John C. Zacharis First Book Award in 2015 for her story collection, The Missing Woman. Her upcoming debut novel, The Same Country, shortlisted in The Masters Review Novel Excerpt Prize, is published by the London-based Legend Press on August 29, 2023. An American ex-pat now living in Wales, Carole worked as a journalist, including for washingtonpost.com and The New York Times, for some 15 years before moving to the UK, where she is now an Associate Professor in English teaching Creative Writing at the University of Southampton. Her short fiction has been longlisted in the BBC’s National Short Story Award and published in Mslexia. Her first book, Off the Page: Writers Talk About Beginnings, Endings, and Everything in Between, was based on her washingtonpost.com interviews with 43 writers including Jhumpa Lahiri, Andrea Levy, Colm Tóibín, Anthony Doerr, Walter Mosley, Richard Ford, and A.S. Byatt.