Fox Cities Book Festival: Connecting writers and readers across our diverse communities.

Brenda Peynado's genre-bending short story collection, The Rock Eaters—featuring alien arrivals, angels falling from rooftops, virtual reality, and sorrows manifesting as tumorous stones—garnered starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, and was named one of NPR, the New York Public Library, and Electric Literature's best books of the year. Her stories have won an O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award, and inclusion in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and over forty other short stories have appeared in places such as Tor.com, The Georgia Review, The Sun, The Southern Review, and Epoch. She teaches creative writing at the University of Houston.