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Valerie Laken’s short story collection, Separate Kingdoms, was long-listed for the Story Prize and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her novel, Dream House, received the Anne Powers Prize for Fiction and was listed among Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2009. Her work has been published in numerous journals, including Ploughshares, Chicago Tribune, and Alaska Quarterly Review, and has received a Pushcart Prize and a Missouri Review Editors Prize. She holds an MA in Slavic Literature and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, and she teaches in the graduate program for creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.