Mary Kay Zuravleff

Mary Kay Zuravleff is the award-winning author of American Ending, a gritty and darkly humorous novel inspired by her family's saga and the fact that she could not find her Appalachian coal mining ancestors—immigrants of the Old Believer Russian Orthodox faith—on any bookshelf. How long does it take to write a book? This one has been in the works ever since her mother named her for her two grandmothers: Mary, who married her Russian-born husband at fourteen and had eleven children, and Kay, who forced the mining company to pay in cash rather than scrip and then got her husband away from the mines before black lung killed him.

Mary Kay is also the author of Man Alive!, a Washington Post Notable Book, as well as The Bowl Is Already Broken and The Frequency of Souls. She is the winner of the American Academy's Rosenthal Award and a multiple recipient of the DC Artist Fellowship. Born in Syracuse, raised in Oklahoma City, and educated in Houston and Baltimore, she lives in Washington, DC.