STEFAN KIESBYE was born on the German coast of the Baltic Sea. He studied drama and worked in radio before starting a degree in American studies, English, and comparative literature at Berlin's Freie Universität. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and Publishers Weekly, among others. His first book, Next Door Lived a Girl, won the Low Fidelity Press Novella Award. The novel Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone made Entertainment Weekly's Must List and was named one of the best books of 2012 by Slate. The LA Noir Fluchtpunkt Los Angeles and the novel The Staked Plains appeared in 2015. On publication of his most recent book Knives, Forks, Scissors, Flames, German newspaper Die Welt called the author "the
inventor of the modern German gothic novel." Kiesbye teaches creative writing at Sonoma State University in Northern California.