Rebecca McKanna is an associate professor of English at the University of Indianapolis. Her debut novel, Don’t Forget the Girl, was nominated for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ+ Mystery and the 2023 Strand Magazine’s Critics Award for Best Debut Mystery, and awarded the 2024 Indiana Authors Award for Genre Fiction. Her short stories have been anthologized in The Best American Mystery Stories 2019 and recognized as distinguished in The Best American Short Stories 2019. She has been published in Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Rumpus, among others.

Among other things, Rebecca and Carter discuss the process of launching a debut novel, the struggle of self-promotion and going public with your book, and the differences between genre fiction and literary fiction. At the end of their conversation, they make up a chilling story using a line from Samantha Jayne Allen’s Next of Kin.