Maria Dahvana Headley is a memoirist, novelist, and editor, most recently of the novel Queen of Kings and the New York Times bestselling anthology Unnatural Creatures (coeditor with Neil Gaiman). As the author of the work of short fiction "The Traditional," she has been nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. She lives in Brooklyn with a seven-foot stuffed crocodile and a collection of star charts from the 1700s.