Anna Mazhirov received her MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University, where she won the Joyce Carol Oates Award in Fiction. She is at work on a short story collection, Annals of Our Springs. The stories feature the lives of young women whose families fled the former Soviet Republics in the wake of the collapse of the USSR in the 1990s. Set in the poorer sections of Brooklyn, her stories are the first to emerge from this new wave of immigrants, introducing us to characters we have never met before: young women–most of them Ukrainian by birth and of Jewish heritage–who are determined to navigate their way through the sometimes harsh realities of the present.