Holly Goddard Jones is an author and educator best known for literary fiction. She was a recipient of The Fellowship of Southern Writers’ Hillsdale Prize for Excellence in Fiction and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and her work has appeared in several literary publications, including The Best American Mystery Stories, New Stories from the South, and Tin House magazine, in addition to two of her own short story collections and two novels.

In the 2010s, while teaching at a residency in a highly wooded part of Tenessee, Jones was inspired to write a horror story about an insidious species of ticks that carry a horrifying deadly disease. That story became a novel, rooted in the climate crisis, in which Jones explored not just the horror of the ticks themselves, but how the inequities baked into our existing socioeconomic system might look in the face of a serious existential threat.