Annie DeWitt is a fiction writer, essayist and critic. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA in fiction from Columbia School of The Arts. She teaches in the Undergraduate Creative Writing Program at Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The Believer, Tin House, Guernica, Esquire, NOON (where an excerpt of this novel first appeared), BOMB, Electric Literature, and The American Reader, amongst others. Her story, "Influence,” which first appeared in Esquire's Napkin Fiction Project was recently anthologized in Short: An International Anthology, edited by Alan Ziegler (Persea, 2014). DeWitt was a co-founding editor of Gigantic, a literary journal of short prose and art carried throughout the U.S. and abroad. She currently pens a bimonthly nonfiction column about art, literature, film and criticism for The Believer, called "Various Paradigms.”