Sara Reish Desmond grew up in central Pennsylvania. Her debut fiction collection, WHAT WE MIGHT BECOME, was published in October 2024 and earned an Independent Publishers Award and a Storytrade Award. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts and her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Kenyon Review, Water~Stone Review, Cutthroat: A Journal for the Arts, and Front Porch among other publications. Her short stories have been finalists for the Rick DeMarinis Short Story Prize, The Copper Nickel Award and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Sara was recently named the 2025-2026 Gish Jen Fellow at Writer’s Room of Boston where she is at work on a novel about grief and redemption set in the rural Pennsylvania of her upbringing. She teaches and writes in a very old house just north of Boston where she lives with her husband and two daughters.