A.J. Rodriguez was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is a graduate of Cornell University and the University of Oregon’s MFA program. His work has been awarded the Granum Foundation Prize and received support from MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Hawthornden Foundation. His stories have won CRAFT’s Flash Fiction Contest, the Swamp Pink Fiction Prize, and the Kinder/Crump Award for Short Fiction from Pleiades. His fiction also appears in The Common, Salamander, New England Review, and elsewhere.