Shelby Rae Stringfield is currently a student in the Creative Writing and Environment MFA program. She is a graduate of the University of Tennessee where she worked with the university’s undergraduate literary arts magazine, the Phoenix, as fiction editor and then editor-in-chief. She writes primarily fiction, occasionally creative nonfiction, and when prompted has been known to turn out a poem or two for which her dog, Gavin, is the primary subject and muse. Her literary loves include Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jeffrey Eugenides, Donna Tartt, Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Chabon, Colum McCann, and (when in need of a chuckle) Nick Hornby.
In her free time, she enjoys long walks around her apartment complex with Gavin, binge-watching the best of TV drama and comedy (Orphan Black, VEEP, Jane the Virgin, Orange is the New Black, and more that she will adamantly and repeatedly recommend whether her advice is solicited or not), eating, and marveling at the vastness of the corn fields in her new environment that contrast greatly against the mountain views she grew up with in the Tennessee Valley.