Laura Maylene Walter is the author of the novel Body of Stars, which was published in 2021 by Dutton/Penguin Random House and Hodder Studio/Hachette UK. Her writing has appeared in Poets & Writers, Kenyon Review, The Sun, Slate, Ninth Letter, Literary Hub, The Masters Review, and many other publications. She has been a Tin House Scholar, a recipient of the Ohioana Library Association’s Walter Rumsey Marvin Grant, the winner of the G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Fiction, and a writer-in-residence at Yaddo, the Chautauqua Institution, and Art Omi: Writers. Walter holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University, where she coordinated the Winter Wheat writing festival and served as fiction editor of Mid-American Review. Currently, she is the editor-in-chief of Gordon Square Review and is the Ohio Center for the Book Fellow at Cleveland Public Library.