Emma Törzs is the author of Ink Blood Sister Scribe, a New York Times Notable Book and international bestseller. Her short fiction has been honored with an NEA fellowship in prose, a World Fantasy Award, and an O. Henry Prize, and been published in journals such as American Short Fiction, Uncanny, Ploughshares, and Lightspeed. She teaches creative writing at Macalester College.
While at MacDowell, she worked on her second novel and a book of short stories, all of which take place at the confluence of real Western science and imagined technology/magic. Some of the stories are historical in nature and have a research component, but with a speculative twist. For example, one story in the collection is about the 17th century French and English doctors who competed to perform the first successful blood transfusion on a man in Paris; it is also about werewolves. Another story is set in 19th century Philadelphia during a heated debate on using ether to relieve the pain of childbirth; it also concerns the Jewish Ibbur, a positive form of possession.
