Ron Carlson is the author of ten books of fiction, most recently the novel The Signal. His novel Five Skies was selected as one of the best books of 2007 by the Los Angeles Times and as the one book Rhode Island for 2009. His selected stories is A Kind of Flying, (W.W. Norton ), and his short fiction has appeared in Esquire, Harpers, The New Yorker, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, Epoch, The Oxford American and other journals, as well as The Best American Short Stories, The O’Henry Prize Series, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and dozens of other anthologies. A graduate of the University of Utah, Mr. Carlson is Director of the Graduate Program in Fiction at the University of California, Irvine. Graywolf Press published his book on the process of writing: Ron Carlson Writes a Story. Among his awards are a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and the Cohen Prize at Ploughshares, the McGinnis Award at the Iowa Review and the Aspen Foundation Literary Award.