Olufunke Grace Bankole is the author of The Edge of Water, Winner of the Westport Prize for Literature and the Ploughshares John C. Zacharis First Book Award, a Best Book of the Year at TIME Magazine, Apple Books, Electric Literature, Chicago Review of Books, Debutiful, Well-Read Black Girl, and more. The Edge of Water was also Longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and named Finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, the New American Voices Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award, the Pacific Northwest Book Awards, and the Oregon Book Awards. It has been widely praised, including by Oprah Daily, Goodreads, Ms. Magazine, Book Riot, Brittle Paper, The Root, and The Lagos Review. A graduate of Harvard Law School and a Soros Justice Advocacy Fellow, Bankole’s work has appeared in numerous publications, including Ploughshares, Glimmer Train Stories, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, and The Antioch Review. She won the Glimmer Train Short-Story Award for New Writers, and has received honors and support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Oregon Literary Fellowship Program, and the Sitka Center for Artand Ecology. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her family.

Instagram: @olufunke.grace.bankole