Stephen Banks is a first-year fiction MFA candidate at Syracuse University. He was born in Austin, Texas and received his B.A. in Creative Writing and Philosophy from Dartmouth College in 2018. There, he won the Sidney Cox Memorial Prize for his honor's thesis novel, B-Sides. Since graduating, he has worked in public education as a tutor and teacher in Title I schools. His writing explores his Chinese and African American heritage, the concept of masculinity within those cultures, and the scars handed down through generations. His work has appeared in The Foundationalist magazine and Ethel zine.