Rivka Galchen is a New York-based writer and a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine. Her debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008), was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year as well as both a Slate and Salon.com Best Book of 2009. Galchen has taught creative writing at Columbia University, where she completed her own MFA in Fiction in 2006 and was a Robert Bingham Fellow. She also holds a medical degree in psychiatry from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Galchen won the 2010 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award in 2009, and has received fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Her work has appeared recently in the New Yorker, Harper’s, the New York Times, The Believer, and New York Magazine. In July 2010, Galchen was featured as one of the New Yorker’s “20 under 40” fiction writers.