MERRITT TIERCE is the author of the novel Love Me Back and a recipient of a 2019 Whiting Foundation Award. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 author and Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award winner and her fiction, reviews, and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, A Fucking Magazine, Volume 0, Oxford American, Cosmopolitan, Marie-Claire, and elsewhere. She worked as an abortion rights and reproductive justice activist in Texas for ten years before earning an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She lives in Los Angeles and wrote for the last two seasons of the Netflix show Orange Is the New Black; in recent years she has been developing various television projects about abortion. She has published numerous essays about abortion, including a 2021 cover story for The New York Times Magazine called "The Abortion I Didn't Have."