Like Sharon Stone and the zipper, Dr. Mike McClelland is originally from Meadville, Pennsylvania. He has lived on five different continents while serving as a strategic planning director for the marketing communications conglomerate WPP, but now resides in Illinois with his husband, two sons, and a menagerie of ancient rescue dogs. He is the author of the short fiction collection Gay Zoo Day and teaches creative writing at Eastern Illinois University, where he won the 2024 Distinguished Faculty Award and serves as the fiction editor for the literary magazine Bluestem. His creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Guardian, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, WIRED, Boston Review, Vox, The Baffler, Fairy Tale Review, Ecotone, and a number of literary magazines and anthologies. He's a graduate of Allegheny College, the London School of Economics, the MFA Program at Georgia College, the University of Georgia's Creative Writing PhD Program, and the University of Illinois' Diversity and Equity in Education Program.