Merrill Feitell was born and raised in New York City. Her first book, Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes, won the Iowa Award for Short Fiction. Her stories have appeared in many publications, including Best New American Voices, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Glimmer Train, and have been short-listed in Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards.

She studied writing in college at UC-Santa Cruz and went on to earn her MFA from Columbia University. She has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, The Corporation of Yaddo, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference,  Taos Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Bethesda Writers’ Center, which named her as a 2011 Emerging Writer Fellow.

Merrill has taught fiction writing at Pratt Institute, SUNY Purchase, Colorado College, and she has served on faculty in the MFA program at University of Maryland and at Cal State San Bernardino. In addition to teaching, Merrill is also a crackerjack copywriter with over a decade’s experience in branding, marketing, and word-smithing for a wide range of start-ups and Fortune 500 companies. (Want to check out her copywriting portfolio?) Until leaving NYC, she volunteered at 826NYC since its inception in 2004 and she has been Fiction Editor for Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, and Light Industrial Safety since 2007.

She lives in Los Angeles and is currently at work on a novel and a series of essays about driving cross-country with her dog, who is a fine companion, yet a horrible driver. You can contact Merrill directly at merrill feitell (all one word) at gee mail dot com.