A native New Yorker, Thisbe Nissen has eschewed her home city in favor of the quieter pace of the Midwest. At 18, she left the city to pursue her BA at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. From Ohio, Thisbe moved to Iowa City, Iowa, where she received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and received a 1998 James Michener-Paul Engle Fellowship. “I'm much happier out here in the farmland of the Midwest where the sensory input is very quiet and things move slowly enough that I can write to make sense of eighteen years spent as an urbanite,” says Thisbe. The award-winning stories in Out of the Girls' Room and into the Night have grown from her years spent away from New York and have taken shape in the West Liberty, Iowa, farmhouse where Thisbe now lives and writes.