Katy Simpson Smith was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She earned a doctorate in history from the University of North Carolina and an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars. She is the author of We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835, and the novels The Story of Land and Sea, Free Men, and The Everlasting. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Oxford American, Granta, and Literary Hub. She lives in New Orleans.