As a writer and a reader, a few common threads run through the literature most likely to hold my imagination hostage. Readers of my debut novel, If We Were Villains, will recognize many of the themes which, for me, keep pages turning: the intersections of art and life, ekphrastic explorations of performance, and above all, the marvelously messy drama of human dynamics. These are also the hallmarks of Shakespearean drama, which remains the bedrock of my creative and academic endeavors. I have always been drawn to intertextuality, to group stories, and to the magnetic, unnamable something lurking like a black hole at the heart of all close-knit (dare I say cultish?) communities. As these novels and, I hope, my own serve to illustrate, the very things that bring people together sometimes tear them apart.

—M.L. Rio

M. L. Rio is an author, music writer, former bookseller, and recovering actor turned academic. Her first novel, If We Were Villains, was published by Flatiron Books in 2017. She holds an MA in Shakespeare Studies from King's College London and Shakespeare's Globe, and currently lives in Washington, DC. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland, where she studies representations of madness and mood disorder on the early modern stage.

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