Ellen Kwatnoski is the author of a novel, Still Life with Aftershocks, which was one of 50 semi-finalists (out of 5,000 entrants) in the 2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest. Her short story, “Like with Like,” appeared in the Northern Virginia Review. She writes book reviews for the Washington Independent Review of Books and was a judge in the 2012 Maryland Writers’ Association’s “Great Beginnings” Novel Contest. She belongs to the Northern Virginia Writers Club and the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. After a career in not-for-profit sales and marketing, she is now a full-time fiction writer who blogs regularly about art, design, dance, and other sources of inspiration at www.ellenkwatnoski.com.