Cheeni Rao is a graduate of the University of Chicago as well as the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is a winner of the Nick Adams Award for fiction and the Olga and Paul Menn Foundation Prize for fiction, and has had many of his stories published in nationally distributed journals. His three plays, Phone, Broken Circle, and Islands, were produced by The Asian Theatre Project, and he has had a screenplay optioned by a major Hollywood studio. He is the founder and owner of The Iowa Book Doctors, an editing firm that edits and ghostwrites manuscripts for publication and conducts online one-on-one instruction on the craft of writing.