Maria Kuznetsova was born in Kiev, Ukraine and moved to the United States as a child. She has a BA from Duke University and recently received an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her work has received a Special Mention in the 2016 Pushcart Prize Anthology and appears or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, The Normal School, The Iowa Review, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City with her husband and cat.