Miroslav Penkov was born in 1982 in Bulgaria. He moved to America in 2001 and eventually completed an MFA in creative writing at the University of Arkansas. He is the author of the story collection, East of the West (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), and the novel, Stork Mountain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). His stories have won the BBC International Short Story Award 2012 and The Southern Review's Eudora Welty Prize and have appeared in A Public Space, Granta, One Story, The Best American Short Stories 2008, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013. His work has been translated in over twenty languages. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Texas.