Joanna Hershon is the author of five novels: St. Ivo, Swimming, The Outside of August, The German Bride and A Dual Inheritance. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, One Story, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and the literary anthologies Brooklyn Was Mine and Freud’s Blind Spot, among other places; and was shortlisted for the 2007 O. Henry Prize Stories. She teaches in the creative writing department at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn.