Xujun Eberlein grew up in Chongqing, China, and moved to the United States in the summer of 1988. After receiving a Ph.D. from MIT in the spring of 1995, and winning an award for her dissertation, she joined a small but ambitious high tech company. On Thanksgiving 2003, she gave up algorithms for writing. She has since won a bunch of literary awards. Her stories and personal essays have been published in the United States, Canada, England, Kenya, and Hong Kong, in magazines such as AGNI, Walrus, PRISM International, StoryQuarterly, Stand, and Kwani. Her debut story collection "Apologies Forthcoming" won the 2007 Tartt Fiction Award and was published in June 2008. She is the recipient of a 2008 artist fellowship in fiction/creative nonfiction from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.