Irene is a fiction writer, essayist, and 2018 NEA Literature Fellow. Her pieces appear in journals like Narrative, The Millions, and Salon, and have won the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, the Pearl Editor's Prize, and others. She's written about dog training, lesbian parenting, opera, blackberries and her own superhero origin story: being the first girl to win the Washington State Geography Bee. She lives in Seattle.