Leslie Pietrzyk is the author of Pears on a Willow Tree (Avon Books) and A Year and a Day (William Morrow). Her collection of short fiction, This Angel on My Chest is forthcoming from University of Pittsburgh Press in the fall of 2015. She teaches in the graduate writing program at Johns Hopkins in Washington, DC, and is a member of the faculty at the low-residency MFA program at Converse College.