Molly Giles was born in San Francisco in 1942. She graduated from San Francisco State University where she majored in English with an emphasis on Creative Writing. Her first collection of short stories, ROUGH TRANSLATIONS, which was based on her Masters Thesis, won the Flannery O'Connor Prize for Short Fiction. Four subsequent story collections-CREEK WALK, BOTHERED, ALL THE WRONG PLACES and WIFE WITH KNIFE-have also won awards, including the San Francisco Commonwealth Silver Medal for Fiction, the Spokane Short Fiction Award, and the Leapfrog Press Global Fiction Prize. She published her first novel, IRON SHOES, in 2000, and, twenty-three years later, published its sequel, THE HOME FOR UNWED HUSBANDS. She taught Creative Writing for seventeen years at San Francisco State University and later taught for fourteen years at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, returning every semester break to drive back to her home in Woodacre, where she now resides.