Kelly McMasters is a professor, nationally bestselling author, and former bookshop owner living in New York. Along with The Leaving Season, she is the author of Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir of an Atomic Town, an Orion Book Award finalist and one of Oprah’s Top 5 Summer Memoirs, and co-editor of Wanting: Women Writing About Desire and This is the Place: Women Writing about Home. She teaches at Hofstra University.