Born in Orange, NJ, Vincent Czyz earned his BA in English literature at Rutgers University, an MA in comparative literature from Columbia University, and an MFA at Rutgers University. He spent three years at the North Jersey Herald News in Passaic, NJ, where he served as copy editor, book reviewer, and feature writer. He is the author of a novel, a novella, an essay collection, and a collection of short fiction, which won the Eric Hoffer Award for Best in Small Press. He received two fellowships from the NJ Council on the Arts, the W. Faulkner-W. Wisdom Prize for Short Fiction, and a Capote Fellow at Rutgers. His stories and essays have appeared in New England Review, Shenandoah, AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, Tin House (online), Boston Review, Copper Nickel, The Tampa Review, and Southern Indiana Review, among other publications. He spent a total of nearly a decade in Istanbul, Turkey before settling in Jersey City