Debra Spark is the author of The Pretty Girl, a collection of stories about art and deception that will be published in April 2012 by Four Way Books. She is the author of the novels Coconuts for the Saint, The Ghost of Bridgetown and Good for the Jews. Spark edited the best-selling anthology Twenty Under Thirty: Best Stories by America's New Young Writers and her popular lectures on writing are collected in Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing. Spark has also written for Esquire, Ploughshares, The New York Times, Food and Wine, Yankee, Down East, The Washington Post, Maine Home + Design and The San Francisco Chronicle, among other places. She has been the recipient of several awards including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Bunting Institute fellowship from Radcliffe College, and the John Zacharis/Ploughshares award for best first book. She is a professor at Colby College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and lives with her husband and son in North Yarmouth, Maine.