Maria Kuznetsova was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and lives in Auburn, Alabama, where she is an Assistant Professor at Auburn University. She is the author of Oksana, Behave! and Something Unbelievable, which will be published by Random House in April of 2021. She is the fiction editor of The Bare Life Review and the Southern Humanities Review and her work appears in Slate, Guernica, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Southern Review, and more.
I thought: I would never write a fictional scene like this, because it was too obvious—the art butting up against reality, as though my story held some kind of portentous power.