Derek Palacio is the author of the novella How to Shake the Other Man and the novel The Mortifications. His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Kenyon Review, StoryQuarterly, Witness, and elsewhere. His short story, “Sugarcane,” appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013.
Palacio is a recipient of fellowships from the Black Mountain Institute, Ragdale, CubaOne, and the National Park Service. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from the Ohio State University, and has taught at the University of Oregon, the Institute of American Indian Arts, the Bennington Writing Seminars, and the University of Michigan, among others.
Palacio unspools his characters’ lives with the type of omniscient authority befitting an epic…The narrative may operate on a grand scale, but Palacio is just as gifted a miniaturist, able to distill the unbearable ruptures in a family down to a single image.
— Dinaw Mengestu, The New York Times Book Review
