Congratulations to Peter Mountford, a good friend of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop and an excellent fiction and nonfiction writer, whose piece, “Life in the Group Room” was recently published in The New York Times Magazine.  Peter Mountford originally read ‘”Life in the Group Room” at “A Night at the Victrola,” an AWP 2014 Reading sponsored by the Cambridge Writer’s Workshop.  Thank you Peter, for sharing this brave and provocative piece with us!  Peter Mountford’s debut novel, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), won the 2012 Washington State Book Award and was a finalist in the 2012 VCU Cabell First Novelist Prize. In its full-page review, The Seattle Times wrote: “Debut novels don’t come much savvier, punchier, or more entertaining…the work of an extraordinary talent.”  His second novel, The Dismal Science, was published in early 2014 by Tin House Books. For his work on The Dismal Science, he was awarded a 4Culture Grant, a grant from the city of Seattle, and the Corporation of Yaddo’s Wallace Fellowship for a Distinguished Writer.   Since graduating from the University of Washington’s MFA program in 2006, Peter’s short fiction and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Best New American Voices 2008, Conjunctions, Salon, Granta, ZYZZYVA, and Boston Review, where he won second place in the 2007 contest judged by George Saunders. He’s currently a writer-in-residence at the Richard Hugo House and at Seattle Arts and Lectures.   Peter grew up in Washington, DC, apart from three years in Sri Lanka during the early stages of the Sri Lankan civil war.