Hala Alyan is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, as well as four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her latest novel, The Arsonists’ City, was also released by HMH. Her work has been published by the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, Literary Hub, the New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn, where she works as a clinical psychologist and teaches creative writing and graduate psychology at New York University.