Sally Wen Mao’s debut short story collection, Ninetails, (Penguin Books, May 2024) was named one of the Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy Books of 2024 from The Washington Post and Elle magazine, and one of the Best Short Story Collections of 2024 from Electric Literature. She is the author of three previous poetry collections: The Kingdom of Surfaces (Graywolf Press, August 2023), a finalist for the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Prize; Oculus (Graywolf Press, 2019), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2013 and 2021, The Paris Review, A Public Space, Granta, Poetry, Harper’s Bazaar, The Washington Post, and others. The recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she was recently a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington at the George Washington University, and a Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute. She has taught writing at NYU, Cornell, and Sarah Lawrence College, and is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Baruch College.