Elizabeth McCracken is the award-winning author of eight books, Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, The Giant’s House (a National Book Award finalist), Niagara Falls All Over Again, the memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imag­ination, Thunderstruck & Other Stories (winner of the 2014 Story Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award), The Souvenir Museum and The Hero of This Book. She has received grants and fellow­ships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and she was chosen as one of Granta‘s 20 Best American Writers Under 40. She has served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently holds the James Michener Chair for Fic­tion at the University of Texas at Austin.