Maggie Shipstead

Maggie Shipstead is a highly accomplished author, best known for her novel "Great Circle." She was born in Orange County and, although her mother thought she would become an author, Shipstead did not initially share this vision for herself. Despite this, she went on to earn a Stanford Wallace Stegner Fellowship and graduated from the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop. Her writing has been featured in several esteemed publications, including The Best American Short Stories, The New York Times, and The Paris Review Daily.

Shipstead has received numerous accolades for her work. In 2012, she was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Fiction, and her debut novel, "Seating Arrangements," won the Art Seidenbaum Award from the LA Times, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and became a bestseller in the US. Her success as an author is even more impressive considering she did not originally aspire to this career.

In addition to her novels, Shipstead has also published short stories in various publications. She has received several prestigious awards for her writing, including the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Dylan Thomas Prize. She is a graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has also been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Shipstead's writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. She currently resides in Los Angeles.