Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Michael Downs won third-place in an all-comers writing contest at Naubuc Elementary School for his story "The Day the World Went Poof." Encouraged, he's kept writing--from homemade comic books for friends to newspaper reports on college basketball games to reviews of restaurants that serve too much fried food. When he studied literary writing, he was fortunate to have a mentor who told him, "we write from where we get the wound," which led Downs to focus on his hometown. The results include HOUSE OF GOOD HOPE: A PROMISE FOR A BROKEN CITY, which won the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, and THE GREATEST SHOW, a story collection (LSU Press, 2012). He has won literary fiction fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Maryland State Arts Council, and he has published stories in the Best American Mystery Stories series (2001, 2002). He teaches creative writing at Towson University in Maryland and lives in Baltimore.