Set within the resilient Great Plains, these stories are marked by the region's people, landscape, and the distinctive way it is both regressive in its politics yet also stumbling toward something better. While not all stories are explicitly set in Oklahoma, the state is almost a character—neither protagonist nor antagonist—but instead the weird next-door-neighbor you're perhaps too ashamed of to take anywhere. Who is the embarrassing one—you or Oklahoma?

Dinah Cox lives in her hometown of Stillwater, Oklahoma, where she teaches in the English department at Oklahoma State University and is an associate editor at Cimarron Review.