Jessie Szalay is the 2012 winner of the Hyman Fred Bernstein Jewish Community Prize for Writing. Her essays and articles have appeared in The Pubscriber, Inside Travel of National Geographic Traveler, and The National (Dubai), among others. She is currently an MFA candidate at George Mason University, serves as a nonfiction editor for So to Speak, a Feminist Journal of Language and Art, and is a contributing writer for LiveScience and DC Beer. A native of Southern California and Northern Utah and a Westerner at heart, she now lives in Washington, DC.