Tawny Pike is a 2016 graduate of the MFA program in fiction at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. She was accepted to the Calliope Workshop for Fiction Writing at UCLA and subsequently the recipient of the Taliesin Nexus scholarship. Her short story “The Quillman Girl”, which was originally published in THE SURREAL SOUTH ’13, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has read at the St. Louis Noir at the Bar and led a creative writing course at the U.S. Federal Penitentiary in Marion, IL. She currently resides in Missouri with her two sons.