Zana Previti was born and raised in New England. She was educated at Wellesley College, in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where she earned her degree in English; later, she taught high school English at private schools along the East Coast. She earned her MFA in fiction from the University of California, Irvine in 2012, and her MFA in poetry from the University of Idaho in 2016. Her work has been published in The New England Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. Tin House named her a Summer Conference Fiction Scholar in 2014, and her short fiction has been featured on Oregon Public Radio's State of Wonder. In 2016, her first play, The Gorgon, was performed in a staged reading at the University of Idaho. Zana was recently named the recipient of Poetry International's 2014 C.P. Cavafy Prize for Poetry, and the Fall 2016 Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Penn State Altoona. Her first novel, The Chilling Simple, is forthcoming in 2018 from the University of West Alabama's Livingston Press.