Samantha Schoech’s (pronounced Shay) fiction has appeared in many places including The Sun, Seventeen, The Gettysburg Review, and Glimmer Train. She’s had personal essays and reported pieces in Travel & Leisure, the New York Times, Ozy and Sunset, where she was a senior editor. She is the co-editor of two humor anthologies and the co-founder of the Rowland Writers Retreat in Aurora, NY. She has an M.A. in Creative Writing from UC Davis and she’s been awarded numerous residencies, a Sustainable Arts Foundation grant, and the inaugural Erma Bombeck Humorist-in-Residence Award in 2017. Her collection of stories, My Mother’s Boyfriends was the runner up in the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 2019, and a finalist for the International Beverly Prize in 2020. She recently sold the collection for publication in 2024 and is now trying to finish a novel. She is the staff gifts writer for NYT Wirecutter. Before that, she worked as the founding director of Independent Bookstore Day and as the books editor at the Chronicle. She lives with her bookseller husband and their twins near San Francisco’s Ocean Beach.