Maria Kuznetsova was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and moved to the United States as a child. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her debut novel, Oksana, Behave!, was published by Spiegel & Grau/Random House in 2019, and her second novel, Something Unbelievable, was published by Random House in April of 2021. Her other fiction and nonfiction can be found in venues including Slate, Guernica, Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, Crazyhorse, Catapult and Mississippi Review.

She lives in Auburn, Alabama, with her husband and daughter, where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University. She is also the Fiction Editor of the Southern Humanities Review and The Bare Life Review, a journal of immigrant and refugee literature.

Series presented in conjunction with the Mississippi Review's 50th anniversary.