Lauri Anderson Alford is a third-year PhD student at Texas Tech University, where she serves as an associate fiction editor of Iron Hose Literary Review. Her fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Carolina Quarterly, Passages North, Bellingham Review, The Greensboro Review, NANO Fiction, and elsewhere. Her recent awards include The Tobias Wolff Award, The Robert Watson Literary Prize, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She is also the Round Six winner of NPR's Three-Minute Fiction Contest.