Dana Spiotta is the author of four novels, including Innocents and Others, just published, and the focus of our interview; Stone Arabia, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist in fiction; and Eat the Document, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Spiotta was a Guggenheim Fellow, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, and won the 2008-9 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. She lives in Syracuse with her daughter Agnes and teaches in the Syracuse University MFA program.