“Perhaps it was the strange beauty of Callahan’s stride, or the ugliness of a human machine, or simply the incongruence of amputee and speed. It was something none of them had seen before.”

Leslie Kirk Campbell’s upcoming debut fiction collection, The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs (Sarabande Books, February 2022) won the 2020 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Her award-winning stories appeared in Arts & Letters, Briar Cliff Review, Southern Indiana Review, and The Thomas Wolfe Review. She is the author of Journey into Motherhood: Writing Your Way to Self-Discovery (Riverhead, 1996) and received writing fellowships at Playa and Ucross. She teaches at Ripe Fruit Writing, a creative writing program she founded in San Francisco, Calif.