I am endlessly grateful to my whole heart, my where-ever-you-are-is home, Cherita Harrell, who pays her debts and sees her friends, and to all of the women writers who held me up in my MFA cohort: Nina, Deena, Shelby, Katy, Caroline, Emily, and other kind faces I am sure I am forgetting. Also, an honorable mention for the men: Alex, Brock, and Kevin.

    I have been taught writing by so many generous people, this seems a fitting place to re-create that lineage. To Tim Adell, who will not remember me, but who teaches creative writing at his community college in a way that makes us all believe we can do something beyond wither in the desert. To Susan Straight, Laila Lalami, and all the faculty at UC Riverside’s creative writing program that encouraged me. And most of all the students I met there, my best, longest friends, the Breakfast Club: Joaquin Magos, Garrett Marak, and of course, of course, of course, Adam Kolvas. Knowing you guys has forever changed the shape of my life, and I am so lucky to have met you (but I’m still not getting a friendship tattoo). I will also thank Rutgers-Camden’s MFA program and the Ralph Bunche Fellowship, because they paid me money and that is what you do when institutions pay you money, but I want to thank the living, breathing humans Lisa Zeidner, whose passion even about my mistakes made me feel valued, and Paul Lisicky, whose gentle mode of teaching was a calm port in the storm of my life.

And to my current institutional home, Vanderbilt University’s Graduate English department, who signed up for a level-headed, serious literature scholar and ended up with a science-fiction writer in crisis, the way one sometimes rescues a cat that turns out to be pregnant. I am so grateful to the faculty and students (especially my cohort—Tori, Gigi, Katelyn, Josh, and Huntley), who have made this strange discipline and stranger town feel like home. Special shout out to Jay “Grandpapa” Clayton, for sharing my enthusiasm about robots, but also about theory and nineteenth-century literature. I absolutely can’t leave a paragraph about Vanderbilt without mentioning Wesley Boyko. Thank you for always fighting with me like an equal, even when I was so new and knew so little. Thank you for twelve-hour days in the library researching and two-in-the-morning nights in your freezing apartment reading poetry. Thank you for being one consistent thing at a time when my academic, publishing, and personal lives were simultaneously in upheaval. Thank you because if I look up from my laptop you’ll be sitting across from me at Fido, and somewhere along the line I have come to rely on that.