Michael Downs' career in journalism and writing has led him to work in Arizona, Connecticut, Montana, Arkansas, and Maryland. For his life in literature, he is grateful to the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas, where he finished an MFA degree in 1999. His short fiction has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Five Points, Witness and other literary reviews. He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, where he sets most of his writing on the advice of poet and novelist James Whitehead who once told him, "we write from where we get the wound."