Kay McSpadden is a retired high school English teacher from South Carolina. Her op-eds written for The Charlotte Observer are collected as Notes from a Classroom: Reflections on Teaching. Her fiction has appeared in Kestrel, Cobalt, and Chautauqua. She won the Norman Mailer Center’s 2012 Fiction Prize co-sponsored with the National Council of Teachers of English, and was a finalist in the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Festival Fiction Contest.