Roxane Gay is the author of the story collection Difficult Women ; the novel An Untamed State , which was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction; the essay collection Bad Feminist ; Ayiti , a multi-genre collection; and the memoir Hunger . She is currently at work on a comic book in Marvel's Black Panther series. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Mystery Stories 2014 , Best American Short Stories 2012 , Best Sex Writing 2012 , A Public Space , McSweeney's , Tin House , Oxford American , American Short Fiction , West Branch , Virginia Quarterly Review , NOON , the New York Times , the Guardian , Bookforum , Time , the Los Angeles Times , The Nation , The Rumpus, Salon, and many others. She is a recipient of the PEN Center USA Freedom to Write Award, among other honors. She splits her time between Indiana and Los Angeles. HEIDI PITLOR is a former senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and has been the series editor for The Best American Short Stories since 2007. She is the author of the novels The Birthdays and The Daylight Marriage.