MERYL BRANCH-McTIERNAN is a novelist, essayist, and screenwriter. Her short fiction has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail and the Southampton Review. She cowrote and produced the comedy feature Katie's Mom, which won the Audience Award for Fusion Features at the 2023 Dances with Films festival. She received her BS in television, radio, and film from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, and her MFA in creative writing and literature from Stony Brook University. She lives on Manhattan's Lower East Side. This is her first novel.