Elizabeth Harris is a native Texan who grew up in Ft. Worth and in Pittsburgh, PA. She won the John Simmons Prize, awarded by University of Iowa Press, for her first book, The Ant Generator, a collection of stories praised for their “sense of wonder and comedy” and “acid-etched existentialism.” Those and uncollected stories appeared in Antioch Review, Epoch, Chicago Review, North American Review, Shenandoah, and other magazines, and have been anthologized in New Stories from the South, Best of Wind, The Iowa Award, and Literary Austin. Mayhem will be her second book. She taught fiction writing and modern literature for a number of years at the University of Texas in Austin, where she and her husband live.