The Necessaries

Misty Urban's short stories have won awards from New Letters, Indiana Review, Writers at Work, the Atlantic Monthly, and Cornell University, and she was the 2017 recipient of the Great River Writer's Retreat. Her debut collection of short stories won the Serena McDonald Kennedy Award for fiction and was published by Snake Nation Press. She holds a Ph.D. in Old and Middle English Literature from Cornell University and her dissertation, Monstrous Women in Middle English Romance, won the D. Simon Evans Award for Medieval Studies and was published by Edwin Mellen Press. A co-edited collection of essays on the medieval fairy Melusine titled Melusine's Footprint: Tracing the Legacy of a Medieval Myth came out from Brill in 2017. She is the founding editor of femmeliterate, a website devoted to feminism, literature, and women in/and/of books. When not working on her latest novel, she teaches writing at Muscatine Community College in Muscatine, Iowa, where she lives with a handsome park ranger, two small people who like to be read to, and a rather heavy collection of books.