Shelly Oria was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Israel. Her short story collection, New York 1, Tel Aviv 0, came out from FSG and Random House Canada in 2014 and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and shortlisted for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, among other honors. Shelly's fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney's, fivechapters, and Electric Lit's Recommended Reading, and won the Indiana Review Fiction Prize, a Sozopol Fiction Seminars Fellowship in Bulgaria, and the LMCC Workspace Grant among other awards. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, curates the series Sweet! Actors Reading Writers in the East Village, has a private practice as a creativity coach, and teaches fiction at Pratt Institute, where she also co-directs the Writers' Forum.