Dana Spiotta is the author of four novels: Innocents and Others (2016), which won the St. Francis College Literary Prize and was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Stone Arabia (2011), which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in fiction; Eat the Document (2006), which was a National Book Award Finalist for Fiction and a recipient of the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and Lightning Field (2001). Spiotta was a Guggenheim Fellow, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, and she won the 2008-9 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her the John Updike Prize in Literature. Spiotta lives in Syracuse, New York and teaches in the Syracuse University MFA program.