Brenda Peynado is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English in the College of Arts & Sciences. Her latest book, Times Agent, about a disgraced time agent on one last mission for redemption to save a world destroyed by capitalism and her own actions forty years previous, won the Phillip K. Dick Award and was one of Amazon Editors and Book Riots best books of August. Her genre-bending short story collection, The Rock Eaters-featuring Latina girlhood, basement ghosts, alien arrivals, angels falling from rooftops, virtual reality, and sorrows manifesting as tumorous stones-was named one of NPR, the New York Public Library, and Electric Literature's best books of 2021. Over forty of her short stories appear in journals such as The Georgia Review, The Sun, Threepenny Review, Epoch, Kenyon Review online, Pleiades, Reactor.com, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Her stories have won a Nelson Algren Award from the Chicago Tribune, an O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Prize; inclusion in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Best Small Fiction, and Best Microfiction anthologies, two Vermont Studio Center Fellowships, and other awards. She teaches fiction to MFAs and undergraduates at the University of South Florida.