Michael Farris Smith is the author of Desperation Road (forthcoming, February 2017), The Fighter (forthcoming, 2018), Rivers, and The Hands of Strangers. He is the recipient of the MLA's Mississippi Author Award for Fiction and the Transatlantic Review Award for Fiction. Rivers was named to numerous Best of the Year lists and his short fiction has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Mississippi with his wife and daughters.