Elissa Schappell is the author of two books of fiction, most recently Blueprints for Building Better Girls, which was chosen as one of the Best Books of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle, TheBoston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek/The Daily Beast, and O, The OprahMagazine. Use Me, her first book, was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her fiction, nonfiction, and criticism have appeared in many publications, including The Paris Review, The New York Times Book Review, Spin, Bomb, One Story, and anthologies such as The Mrs. Dalloway Reader, Lit Riffs, Cooking and Stealing, Bound to Last, and The KGB Bar Reader. She is a contributing editor and the Hot Type columnist at Vanity Fair, a former senior editor at The Paris Review, and a cofounder and editor at large of Tin House magazine. She teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Columbia and in the low-residency MFA program at Queens University in North Carolina. She lives in Brooklyn.