Joanna Hershon is the author of four novels: Swimming, The Outside of August, The German Bride and A Dual Inheritance (May,2013, Ballantine). Her writing has appeared in (among other places)The New York Times, One Story, The Virginia Quarterly Review, the literary anthologies Brooklyn Was Mine and Freud’s Blind Spot, and was shortlisted for the 2007 O. Henry Prize Stories. She’s an adjunct assistant professor in the Creative Writing department at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, painter Derek Buckner, and their twin sons.