Ellen Litman is an associate professor of English and the associate director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of two novels, Mannequin Girl (W.W. Norton 2014) and The Last Chicken in America (W.W. Norton 2007), which was a finalist for the 2007 LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the 2008 New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her fiction, nonfiction, and translations have appeared in American Odysseys: Writing by New Americans, East European Jewish Affairs, Guernica, The Forward, the New Yorker online, and elsewhere. Born in Moscow, she immigrated to the US in 1992.