Kristopher Jansma is the winner of the 2014 Sherwood Anderson Award for Fiction and the author of Why We Came to the City (Viking/Penguin). His first novel, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, received an Honorable Mention for the 2014 PEN/Hemingway Award and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and the Flaherty-Dunnan Debut Novel Prize. 

He has written for The New York Times, Story, Zyzzva, Slice Magazine, Electric Literature, and The Believer. He is a graduate of the Writing Seminars program at Johns Hopkins University and received his MFA in Fiction at Columbia University. He is an Assistant Professor at SUNY New Paltz College and a Graduate Instructor at Sarah Lawrence College.