JESSICA HENDRY NELSON is the author of the memoir If Only You People Could Follow Directions as well as Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writers' Guide and Anthology with coauthor Sean Prentiss. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Tin House, the Threeepenny Review, North American Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere. She teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and in the MFA Program at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.