Leslie Kirk Campbell’s debut short story collection, The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs (Sarabande) won the 2020 Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction, is a 2022 Women’s National Book Association Great Group Reads Selection, a finalist for American Book Fest's 2022 Best Book Awards, and a 2022 Foreword INDIES finalist in short fiction. Her stories have been published in Ploughshares, Arts & Letters, Briar Cliff Review and elsewhere. The Chronicle Book Review called her collection “unforgettable…a tour de force.” Anthony Doerr called it “sexy and harrowing, both timeless and timely.” The author of Journey into Motherhood: Writing Your Way to Self-Discovery (Riverhead), she has published features in the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine about improving SF public schools and teenage gun violence. Campbell, who received an MA in Poetry from San Francisco State and an MFA in Fiction from Bennington Writing Seminars, has received fellowships from Ucross and Playa. A native Californian, Campbell teaches at Ripe Fruit Writing, a creative writing program she founded in San Francisco in 1991.