Marissa Lingen, author of the Tor.Com Original, The Ministry of Changes, is an American science fiction and fantasy writer born July 26, 1978 in Libertyville, Illinois. Trained in physics and mathematics, she worked for a time at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Over the last decade her short fiction has appeared in Analog, Ideomancer, Baen’s Universe, Clarkesworld, Futurismic, and Nature, among other venues, and stories by her have been reprinted in several anthologies including David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer’s Year’s Best SF 15 (2010). She lives in Minnesota.