L. Shapley Bassen's "Portrait of a Giant Squid" was the First Place winner in the 2015 Austin Chronicle Short Story Contest. She was Fiction Editor for http://prickofthespindle.org/ till cessation of publication after 6 yrs], 2014 author of Summer of the Long Knives (Typhoon Media), Lives of Crime & Other Stories (Texture Press), and 2017novella/story collection, Showfolk & Stories [Inkception Books]. She was a finalist for the 2011 Flannery O’Connor Award, was a 1st reader for Electric Literature, won the 2009 APP Drama Prize and a Mary Roberts Rinehart Fellowship, and is poetry/fiction reviewer for Brooklyner, The Rumpus, and others.