Jeff Fearnside is author of the essay collection Ships in the Desert (SFWP, 2022)—winner of several post-publication awards, including a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award—and two short-story collections: A Husband and Wife Are One Satan (Orison Books, 2021), winner of the Orison Chapbook Prize, and Making Love While Levitating Three Feet in the Air (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2016), winner of an Eyelands International Book Award. His short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in dozens of literary journals and anthologies, including The Paris Review, Los Angeles Review, Story, The Pinch, and Rewilding: Poems for the Environment (Flexible Press, 2020). His writing has been nominated for Best New American Voices, The Best Small Fictions, and four times for a Pushcart Prize. Lori Messing McGarry, producer and host of Real Fiction Radio, notes, “In Ships in the Desert, Jeff Fearnside has written world-class essays. They bring to mind Octavio Paz and Ruszard Kapuściński.” In his review of A Husband and Wife Are One Satan for Peace Corps Worldwide, author Clifford Garstang writes, “Each story is a gem, and while they share a setting, each focuses on a unique aspect of Kazakh life rooted in the singular traditions of this little-known Central Asian republic.” Ideas of place, culture, and the natural environment deeply inform Fearnside’s writing and teaching. He lived and worked in Central Asia for four years, first as a university instructor through the U.S. Peace Corps and later as manager of a prestigious fellowship program in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. He has traveled widely along the Silk Road in Asia, throughout Great Britain and Ireland, and in more than 40 U.S. states. Awards for his work include a Grand Prize in the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards Program and the Mary Mackey Short Story Prize from the National League of American Pen Women, writing residencies at the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest and the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest, and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission. Fearnside earned degrees in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University (BFA) and Eastern Washington University (MFA). He has taught writing and literature in Kazakhstan and at various institutions in the U.S., currently Oregon State University.