Winner of the 2021 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

Joanna Pearson is a lapsed poet who once wrote a young adult novel on a whim but nowadays mostly writes short fiction. Her first collection of stories, Every Human Love, was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Awards, the Foreword Indies Awards, and the Janet Heidinger Prize for Fiction. Her stories have appeared in Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net, as well as other journals. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars and an MD from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. A native of western North Carolina, she now lives with her husband and two daughters near Chapel Hill, where she works as a psychiatrist.