Jennifer Close is the best-selling author of Girls in White Dresses and The Smart One. Her new novel, The Hopefuls, will be out in July 2016. Born and raised on the North Shore of Chicago, she is a graduate of Boston College and received her MFA in Fiction Writing from the New School in 2005. She worked in New York in magazines for many years. She now lives in Washington, DC, and teaches creative writing at George Washington University.