Shelly Oria was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Israel. Her short story collection, New York 1, Tel Aviv 0, came out from FSG and Random House Canada in November 2014. Shelly's fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney's, fivechapters, and Electric Lit's Recommended Reading among other places, and won the Indiana Review Fiction Prize, a Sozopol Fiction Seminars Fellowship in Bulgaria, and the LMCC Workspace Residency among other awards. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, curates the series Sweet! Actors Reading Writers in the East Village, has a private practice as a creativity coach, and teaches fiction at Pratt Institute, where she also co-directs the Writers' Forum.