Chris McCormick is the author of a novel, The Gimmicks (Harper, 2020), a New York Times Editors' Choice, and a short story collection, Desert Boys, winner of the 2017 Stonewall Book Award—Barbara Gittings Literature Award. His essays and stories have appeared in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, and The Southern Review. The son of an Armenian mother and an American father, he grew up in the Antelope Valley on the California side of the Mojave Desert before earning his BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and his MFA from the University of Michigan. He is Associate Professor in the creative writing program at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and is at work on his next book with the support of a 2024 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.