Angela Morales is the author of the critically acclaimed book, The Girls in My Town, for which she received PEN America's 2017 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. The book also won the annual River Teeth Book Prize, and was selected by best-selling author Cheryl Strayed for its handling of “humor, sorrow, and disappointment with humanity and intelligence. I never wanted to stop reading.” Morales has published work in the Pinch, the Southern Review, the Los Angeles Review, the Harvard Review, and Best American Essays. She has served as the Writer-in-Residence at Denali National Park in Alaska, and now teaches creative writing at Glendale College in California.

“When I joined the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program, I knew I was writing some mutant variety of nonfiction, but I didn’t know that I was actually writing essays. In the program’s ‘Forms of the Essay’ class, however, I began to understand more about that shape-shifting, slippery creature—the essay—and I began to recognize the varied and wonderful forms of ‘voice’ in both published writers and in my fellow classmates.  What I learned, above all, during my time in the program was to embrace the distinctiveness of my own voice; I learned to appreciate the quirkiness of my style, and to trust the odd shape of my own writing.”