Frances de Pontes Peebles was born in Pernambuco, Brazil. A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she has received several awards, including Brazil's Sacatar Artist's Fellowship and the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award. Her short stories have appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, the Indiana Review, the Missouri Review, and the O. Henry Prize Story Collection 2005.