Ashley Hand is a service academy graduate and former military officer who spent her twenties deploying all over the world in various conflicts. She left active duty in 2018 to pursue an MFA at Cornell University. Her work has appeared in Carve, Harpur Palate, Blue Mesa Review, and other magazines. She was also the winner of the 2019 Gulf Stream prize in fiction. She lives and writes in upstate New York, where she is at work on her first novel.