Maureen F. McHugh made her first sale in 1989, and has since made a powerful impression on the SF world with a relatively small body of work, becoming one of today's most respected writers. In 1992, she published one of the year's most widely-acclaimed and talked-about first novels, China Mountain Zhang, which won the Locus Award for Best First Novel, the Lambda Literary Award, and the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award, and which was named a New York Times Notable Book as well as being a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Her story "The Lincoln Train" won her a Nebula Award. Her other books, including the novels Half the Day is Night, Mission Child, and Nekropolis, have been greeted with similar enthusiasm. Her powerful short fiction has been collected in Mothers and Other Monsters and After the Apocalypse.