Dominic Russ-Combs welded industrial models in Durham, North Carolina, before publishing his first stories and being awarded both a Stegner Fellowship and an Emerging Artist Award * from the Kentucky Arts Council . His fiction has appeared in the Chicago Tribune , Kenyon Review , Carolina Quarterly , Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine , among others , and his poetry and creative non-fiction have appeared in Third Coast and Indiana Review . As a journalist, his cover stories, features, and reviews appeare