Caroline Wray has taught creative writing as a junior lecturer at Johns Hopkins and was formerly an editorial assistant at Henry Holt and Crown. She began her research into the wives of Henry VIII a decade ago, with that material taking shape into these characters about four years ago. She grew up in Atlanta and received her BA in English from Yale and her fiction MFA from Johns Hopkins, where she won the Benjamin Sankey fellowship. Her short fiction has appeared in Gulf Coast, and she is also at work on her second book, centred around the concept of the muse.