Gwen Thompson was the kid who always ran out of paper for writing assignments in elementary school, when she wasn't getting busted by her teachers for reading too much. This prompted her to earn a Master's degree in Creative Writing from Boston University, winning the Florence Engel Randall Short Story Award and the Lawrence H. Blackmon Book Collecting Prize. She graduated from Bowdoin College, where she won the Nathaniel Hawthorne Short Story Prize, and spent her junior year at Oxford, learning to put milk in her tea, drink warm beer, and watch as much live Shakespeare as humanly possible. She lives in Brooklyn.