Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is the author of the novel Elita (published by TriQuarterly Press/Northwestern University Press in January, 2025) and the story collection Outer Stars, which won the 2025 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction (UNT Press) and will be published in the autumn of 2025. Her three previous collections of short fiction are What We Do with the Wreckage, which won the 2017 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction (University of Georgia Press in 2018); Swimming with Strangers (Chronicle Books, 2008); and This Life She’s Chosen (Chronicle Books, 2005). Kirsten’s short fiction has been honored with a PEN/O. Henry Prize, and her stories have appeared widely in journals, among them The Sun, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, One Story, and McSweeney’s. She has held fellowships from MacDowell, Sewanee, the Jack Straw Writers Program, and the Willa Cather Foundation. Kirsten is a member of the English Department faculty at Seattle’s Bush School.