Like Sharon Stone and the zipper, Dr. Mike McClelland is originally from Meadville, Pennsylvania. He has lived on five different continents but now resides in Illinois with his husband, two sons, and a menagerie of rescue dogs. He is the author of the short fiction collection Gay Zoo Day and his creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rolling Stone, The New York Times, WIRED, Electric Literature, Boston Review, Vox, The Baffler, Fairy Tale Review, and a number of literary magazines and anthologies. His fiction has been recognized as a winner or finalist in competitions given by Salamander, Passages North, Booth, Grist, NYC Midnight, and the Agnes Scott College Writers' Festival, where Pulitzer Prize winner and National Poet Laureate Rita Dove chose his work as the winner of the festival's annual fiction prize. His essay “When Lies Turn to Prophecies” was recently named one of The New York Times’ seven favorite summer love stories, and his collection What Used to Be Caracas was the 2022 runner-up for Hub City Press’s C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize. He is a graduate of Allegheny College, The London School of Economics, the MFA program at Georgia College, and University of Georgia's Creative Writing PhD program, and currently teaches creative writing at Eastern Illinois University.