Maria Dahvana Headley is the New York Times-bestselling, Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning author of eight books, most recently BEOWULF: A NEW TRANSLATION (MCD x FSG), which was named as a book of the year by The Atlantic Monthly, NPR, Vox, The Irish Times, The Guardian, the New Statesman, and more. It won the 2021 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Related Work.  THE MERE WIFE (MCD x FSG), a contemporary adaptation of Beowulf, was named by the Washington Post as one of its Notable Works of Fiction in 2018. She’s written for both teenagers (MAGONIA and AERIE, HarperCollins) and adults, in a variety of genres and forms. Headley’s short fiction has been shortlisted for the Nebula, and Shirley Jackson Awards and for the 2020 Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and has been anthologized in many year’s bests; a collection is under contract to FSG. Her essays on gender, chronic illness, politics, propaganda, and mythology have been published and covered in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Harvard’s Nieman Storyboard, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by The MacDowell Colony, Arte Studio Ginestrelle, and the Sundance Institute’s Theatre Lab, among other organizations. She teaches writing in the master's program at Sarah Lawrence, and delivered masterclasses and writing lectures at Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, UCSD, Oxford University, the University of Iowa, U Penn, Dartmouth, and Northwestern University,  among many others. She grew up in the high desert of Idaho on a survivalist sled dog ranch, where she spent summers plucking the winter coat from her father’s wolf.