Michael X. Wang was born in Fenyang, a small coal-mining city in China's mountainous Shanxi province. His short story collection Further News of Defeat won the 2021 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection and was a finalist for the 2021 CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction. Wang immigrated to the United States when he was six and has lived in ten states and 15 cities. In 2010 he completed his PhD in literature at Florida State University. Before that, he received his MFA in fiction at Purdue. Wang's work has appeared in the New England Review, Greensboro Review, Day One, and Juked, among others. He is currently an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Arkansas Tech University and lives in Russellville, Arkansas.