Susan Scarf Merrell is the author of Shirley: A Novel, which is soon to be major motion picture starring Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg. Other books are the novel A Member of the Family, and The Accidental Bond: How Sibling Connections Influence Adult Relationships. She directs the Southampton Writers Conference, is program director (along with Meg Wolitzer) of the novel-editing program, BookEnds, and teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook Southampton. She served as fiction editor of TSR: The Southampton Review. Essays, book reviews and short fiction appear most recently in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Common Online, The Washington Post, and East Magazine.