J. Ryan Stradal is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Kitchens of the Great Midwest (2015), and his shorter writing has appeared in Hobart, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Midnight Breakfast, and The Rumpus, among other places. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is editor-at-large at LA's Unnamed Press and the fiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown. The only man in his extended family to not own both a gun and a motorcycle, he likes books, sports, wine, rhubarb, root beer, and peas.