Leslie Pietrzyk is the author of two novels, Pears on a Willow Tree and A Year and a Day, as well as a short story collection, This Angel on My Chest, which Jill McCorkle selected as the winner of the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and which was a finalist for the 2016 Library of Virginia Award for Fiction. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in many journals, including The Sun, Shenandoah, Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, New England Review, and the Washington Post Magazine. Excerpts from SILVER GIRL have been published in The Hudson Review, Gettysburg Review, Cincinnati Review, Midwestern Gothic, and River Styx. She has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and, most recently, the Hawthornden Castle Writers Retreat in Scotland. She currently teaches fiction at both the Converse College low-residency MFA program and the Johns Hopkins MA Program in Writing.

"A young woman, desperate to escape the unspoken secrets of her impoverished Midwestern family, bluffs her way into college ... where she meets Jess, charismatic and rich and needy, and the two quickly form an insular, competitive friendship ... As guilt builds for the sister she has left behind, the narrator is drawn into Jess's apparently effortless existence ... But the death of one of [the Tylenol Killer's] victims triggers a surprising chain of events with major repercussions for the lives of both young women. Suddenly the lifestyle the narrator has come to share with Jess vanishes. As her attempts to restore order and control become increasingly desperate, their fragile friendship is exposed; and both young women must confront the realities of an adulthood neither one expected"--Amazon.com.