L. Annette Binder was born in Germany and immigrated to the United States as a small child. She holds degrees in classics and law from Harvard, an MA in comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley, and an MFA from the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. Her short fiction collection, Rise, received the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, and her stories have been included in The Pushcart Prize Anthology and The O. Henry Prize Stories and have been performed on Public Radio’s Selected Shorts. She lives in New Hampshire.