Carly Safko is both a stress baker and a lean, mean research paper-writing machine, which means composing a lot of abstracts at 4 a.m. on a treadmill while eating cookies. She was born in South Korea and moved stateside before she was old enough to appreciate the righteous funk that is kimchi. After kicking around Asia a couple years and discovering that she is really, really bad at karaoke, she moved to the Deep South with her girlfriend for what will hopefully be her last go-round with higher education.

Her writing heroes are Philip Roth, Nelson Algren, and Saul Bellow. She writes all her stories on the couch while her cat cries and bites her hair and critiques her plot structure.