Kristen Roupenian was raised in the Boston area, the daughter of a doctor and a nurse. After graduating from Barnard College in 2003, she spent two years in Kenya, serving in the Peace Corps and working as a health educator. From there, she began a PhD in English at Harvard University, focusing on African literature; she received that degree in 2014 and went on to get an MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers Program in 2017.
She skyrocketed to unusual fame when the short story she published in The New Yorker, "Cat Person," went viral late in 2017; as a result, she received a tremendous advance for her collection of short fiction, You Know You Want This, in...
