Ilse Munro was born in Latvia and came to the United States as a refugee. She was a NASA and Defense Department consultant, then the online editor at Little Patuxent Review and the prose editor at BrickHouse Books. Her short fiction, collected in Cold and Hungry and Far From Home, appears in TriQuarterly, Atticus Review and Wake and made her a finalist in the Glimmer Train Family Matters Contest and Short Story Award for New Writers. A novel, Anna Noon, is in the works. She lives in a historic millworker’s house on the Patapsco River.