Stephen Hundley was raised on the Lincoln River, outside of Richmond Hill, Georgia, where he worked, for a time, as a journalist before earning his bachelor's degree in English from Georgia College & State University. For the next two years, Hundley served as a Teach For America corps member and an environmental science teacher in a high school near Charlotte, North Carolina before leaving the United States to teach English language learners in Seoul, South Korea. After returning to America, Hundley earned a master's degree in English from Clemson University, where he took on a study of contemporary fiction, forming relationships with professional writers, academics, and literary magazines. The eldest stories in The Aliens Will Come to Georgia First were written in this period, sketched out on coffee shop receipts and napkins in Upstate South Carolina, where authors Keith Lee Morris, Nic Brown, and Dan Leach (Floods and Fires, UNG Press 2019) gifted hours of revision and critique to the collection, then just a handful of stories, and encouraged Hundley to continue writing. In Oxford, Mississippi, Hundley joined a cohort of fiction writers in the University of Mississippi's MFA program, where he was awarded a Richard Ford Fellowship and where The Aliens Will Come to Georgia First became a complete manuscript and then a book under the guidance of the graduate workshop and authors Tom Franklin, Chris Offutt, Matt Bondurant, Melissa Ginsburg, and visiting Grisham Scholar, Garth Greenwell. Hundley lives now in Oxford, Mississippi, teaching Young Writer's Workshops and creative writing classes, online and in person, working as a magazine editor for The Swamp and Driftwood Press, and editing his newest work, a psychedelic thriller set on an island on the Georgia-Florida line.
