Kim Edwards received an MFA in Fiction from Colgate University and an MA in Linguistics from the University of Iowa. After completing her graduate work, she and her husband taught on the rural east coast of Malaysia, then in a small city an hour south of Tokyo, and finally in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. While in Asia, she started writing and publishing short fiction. Her story, Sky Juice, won the Nelson Algren Award. Her stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Zoetrope, Anteaus, Story, and The Paris Review and have received a National Magazine Award for Excellence in Fiction and a Pushcart Prize. Her other works include the short story collection The Secrets of a Fire King and a novel The Memory Keeper's Daughter, which won the Kentucky Literary Award for Fiction in 2005. She also received a Whiting Writers' Award in 2002. She is a graduate of the Iowa's Writers' Workshop and currently teaches writing at the University of Kentucky.