Mikhail Iossel, the Leningrad-born author of the story collection Every Hunter Wants to Know (W. W. Norton) and coeditor of the anthologies Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States (Dalkey Archive, 2004) and Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia (Tin House, 2010), is a professor of English/Creative Writing at Concordia University in Montreal and the founding director of the Summer Literary Seminars international program. Back in the Soviet Union, he worked as an electromagnetic engineer/submarine demagnetizer and as roller-coaster security guard, and belonged to the organization of samizdat writers, Club-81. He came to the US in 1986, at the age of thirty, a whole and complete life behind him, and started writing in English in 1988. Among his awards are Guggenheim, NEA, and Stegner Fellowships. His stories and other prose, in English and in translation to several languages, have appeared in NewYorker.com, Guernica, Literarian, AGNI, North American Review, Threepenny Review, Interia, Boulevard, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere.