Rachel Swearingen is the author of the story collection How to Walk on Water and Other Stories, which received the New American Press Fiction Prize, and was named the 2021 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year, as well as a New York Times Book Review “New & Noteworthy Selection.” Her stories and essays have appeared in Electric Lit, VICE, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Off Assignment, Agni, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. Her writing has won the Berlin Writing Prize, the Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction. In 2019, the Guild Literary Complex named her one of 30 Writers to Watch. She lives in Chicago and teaches in Cornell College’s low-residency MFA program.