Kassandra Montag

Kearney, Nebraska, and the farm country around it gave Kassandra Montag her childhood, and she later put that ground under water. After the Flood, published in 2019, sets its story a century ahead, on a drowned continent where Myra and her small daughter Pearl sail the wreckage looking for the elder daughter Myra's husband took from her. Montag earned an MA in English at Creighton University in 2011, studying with Susan Aizenberg and Brent Spencer, and had placed poetry and short fiction in Prairie Schooner, Midwestern Gothic and Mystery Weekly Magazine before the novel appeared. It sold into upwards of a dozen languages and was optioned for television, and Omaha Public Library, in the city where she lives, made it the 2020 Omaha Reads title.