ALLISON AMEND was born in Chicago, Illinois, on a day when the Cubs beat the Mets 2-0. In high school, she lived for a year with a Spanish family in Barcelona and now speaks fluent Catalan. She attended Stanford University, and, though she dropped out three times, managed to graduate with honors in Comparative Literature. She spent her junior year pretending to attend the Sorbonne in Paris. After college, she returned to France on a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship in Lyon, where she taught high school English and mistranslated documents for the Lyon Opera. Allison then attended the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, receiving a Maytag and a Teaching/Writing Fellowship. While there, she learned never to live downwind from a pig farm and how to put English on the cue ball. Allison’s work has received awards from and appeared in One Story, Black Warrior Review, StoryQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Atlantic Monthly, Prairie Schooner, and Other Voices, among other publications. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Djerassi, Saltonstall, Vermont Studio Center, Fundación Valparaiso (Spain), Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts (Canada), Ledig House and The Barn.

Her debut short story collection, Things That Pass for Love (OV/Dzanc Books, 2008) won a bronze IPPY award. Stations West, a historical novel, was published by Louisiana State University Press as part of its Yellow Shoe Fiction series in March, 2010, and is a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

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