KATHERINE L. HESTER was born in Dallas, Texas and raised in Athens, Georgia. Much of her life has been spent shuttling back and forth between Texas and the Deep(er) South. Her first collection, Eggs for Young America, was awarded the Katharine Nason Bakeless Literary Publication Prize for Fiction and chosen as a New York Times Notable Book. Her short stories have been published in American Short Fiction, Five Points, The Yale Review, Southwest Review and elsewhere and anthologized in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and (forthcoming) Best American Mystery Stories. She has been a Dobie-Paisano and Hambidge Center Fellow and has held residencies also at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. She received a Bachelor’s degree in print journalism from the University of Georgia and an M.A. in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was awarded two James A. Michener Fellowships in Writing.

She lives south of Interstate 20 in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband and two daughters.