Katie Cortese received her MFA in Fiction Writing in 2006 from Arizona State University and is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at Florida State University. Her awards include first prize in the 2011 River Styx Schlafly Beer Micro-Fiction Contest as well as several university-sponsored prizes, and her work is published or forthcoming in PANK, Passages North, The Superstition Review, The Ampersand Review, NANOfiction, St. Anns Review, Zone 3, The Comstock Review, Willow Springs, New South, Prick of the Spindle, and Zahir.
The SmokeLong Grand Micro Contest (The Mikey) is now an annual competition celebrating and compensating the best micro fiction and nonfiction online.