Christine Sneed, winner of the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation, is the author of the novel Little Known Facts (Bloomsbury UK & USA, 2013) and the story collection Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry, a 2009 AWP Grace Paley Prize winner, a finalist for the 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Award (first-fiction category), winner of the 2011 John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares, and winner of the Chicago Writers Association 2011 Book of the Year (in the traditionally published fiction category). The San Francisco Chronicle also chose Portraits as one of the fifty best fiction books of 2011. Christine lives in Evanston, Illinois and teaches for the English Department of DePaul University in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago and the graduate writing program at Northwestern University. Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry is her first book, and the ten stories in this collection feature self-questioning protagonists. Her second book, Little Known Facts, focuses on a successful Hollywood actor and the effects of his fame on his two ex-wives and his two grown children, especially his son. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, New England Review, Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Meridian, Pleiades, Notre Dame Review, New Ohio Review, Massachusetts Review, River Styx, and a number of other journals. Christine has also published 30 poems in North American literary journals, was awarded an Illinois Arts Council fellowship in poetry in 2003 and has received five Pushcart Prize nominations. Some of her literary influences include Alice Munro, Martin Amis, Jim Harrison, Deborah Eisenberg, Margaret Atwood, Anne Carson, Steve Almond, Penelope Fitzgerald, Penelope Lively and John Updike. She earned a Master's of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from Indiana University - Bloomington and a Bachelor of Science degree in French language and literature from Georgetown University.