Karen Kao is the winner of the 2022 Kenyon Review Short Nonfiction Contest, a three-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, as well as for the Best American Essays, the VERA, and Best of the Net. Her debut novel, The Dancing Girl and the Turtle (Linen Press 2017) is the first of a quartet of interlocking novels set in Shanghai. Karen’s work has appeared in Brevity, Pleiades, the Kenyon Review, Hippocampus Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, The Common, The Shanghai Literary Review and others. For more information on Karen and her work, please visit www.inkstonepress.com [2].