Yxta Maya Murray is a novelist, art critic, playwright, and law professor. The author of nine books, her most recent are the story collection The World Doesn’t Work That Way, but It Could (University of Nevada Press, 2020) and the novel Art Is Everything (TriQuarterly Press, 2021). She has won a Whiting Award and an Arts Writers Grant, and has been named a fellow at the Huntington Library for her work on radionuclide contamination in Simi Valley, Calif.