Paula Saunders graduated from the Syracuse University Creative Writing program, where she studied with Tobias Wolff and Douglas Unger. It was during this time that she and her husband, the writer, George Saunders, met and married. After Syracuse, Paula was the recipient of the prestigious Albert Schweitzer Fellowship in the Humanities at the State University of New York at Albany, where she spent two years studying under then-Schweitzer Chair, Toni Morrison. "The Distance Home" is her debut novel.