New American Stories

CONTRIBUTOR BIOS

DONALD ANTRIM is the author of the novels Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, The Hundred Brothers, and The Verificationist; a memoir, The Afterlife; and a collection of stories, The Emerald Light in the Air. He contributes fiction and nonfiction to The New Yorker, and his work has appeared in The Paris Review and Harper’s. He has had fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacArthur Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

JESSE BALL is the author of five novels—Samedi the Deafness, The Way Through Doors, The Curfew, Silence Once Begun, and A Cure for Suicide—as well as several works of verse, bestiaries, and sketchbooks. His prizes include the 2008 Paris Review Plimpton Prize for Fiction, and his verse has been included in the Best American Poetry series. He is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s MFA in Writing program.

NOVIOLET BULAWAYO is the author of We Need New Names, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize’s Art Seiden-baum Award for First Fiction, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 fiction selection. We Need New Names was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award, and included on the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2013 list and the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers list. Bulawayo attended Cornell University and Stanford University, where she now teaches as a Jones Lecturer in Fiction.

KYLE COMA-THOMPSON is the author of The Lucky Body. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

ROBERT COOVER has published fourteen novels, three short-story collections, and a collection of plays since The Origin of the Brunists received the William Faulkner Foundation Award for notable first novel in 1966. At Brown University, where he has taught for more than thirty years, he established the International Writers Project, a program that provides an annual fellowship and safe haven to endangered international writers who face harassment, imprisonment, and suppression of their work in their home countries. In 1990–91, he launched the world’s first hypertext fiction workshop, in 1999 was one of the founders of the Electronic Literature Organization, and in 2002 created Cave Writing, the first writing workshop in immersive virtual reality.

LUCY CORIN is the author of the short-story collections One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses and The Entire Predicament and the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls. She was the 2012 John Guare Fellow in Literature at the American Academy in Rome. She teaches at the University of California, Davis.

REBECCA CURTIS is the author of Twenty Grand: And Other Tales of Love and Money (HarperPerennial) and has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, NOON, and other magazines. Curtis received her bachelor’s degree from Pomona College in California. She also holds a Master’s of Fine Arts from Syracuse University and a Master’s of English from New York University.

LYDIA DAVIS is the author of The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, a translation of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, a chapbook entitled The Cows, and a poem in Two American Scenes entitled “Our Village.” In 2013, she was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for fiction, and her most recent collection of stories, Can’t and Won’t, was published in 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

DON DELILLO is the author of fifteen novels, including Falling Man, Libra, and White Noise, and three plays. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the Jerusalem Prize. In 2006, Underworld was named one of the three best novels of the last twenty-five years by The New York Times Book Review, and in 2000 it won the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the most distinguished work of fiction of the past five years.

ANTHONY DOERR is the author of two story collections: The Shell Collector, which won the Rome Prize in 2004, and Memory Wall, which won the Story Prize in 2011. His most recent novel, All the Light We Cannot See, was a finalist for the National Book Award. He lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and sons.

DEBORAH EISENBERG’s four collections of short fiction are available in one volume, The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg. She is also the author of a play, Pastorale. She is a MacArthur Fellow and teaches at Columbia University.

MARY GAITSKILL is the author of four novels: Two Girls, Fat and Thin, Veronica, and The Mare, which is forthcoming from Knopf. She has also written three story collections: Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To, and Don’t Cry. Her work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellow, and a Civitella Ranieri Fellow. She lives in Brooklyn.

RIVKA GALCHEN is an essayist and fiction writer whose work appears regularly in Harper’s, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. She is the author of the award-winning novel Atmospheric Disturbances and the short-story collection American Innovations.

RACHEL B. GLASER is the author of the story collection Pee on Water, the poem book MOODS, and the novel Paulina & Fran. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, and teaches creative writing at Flying Object. She tweets as @Candle_face and @FriendsOnMars.

DENIS JOHNSON is the author of nine novels, one novella, one book of short stories, three collections of poetry, two collections of plays, and one book of reportage. His novel Tree of Smoke won the 2007 National Book Award.

REBECCA LEE is the author of Bobcat, a collection of stories, and The City Is a Rising Tide, a novel. Her fiction has been read on NPR’s Selected Shorts, and her stories have been published in The Atlantic Monthly and Zoetrope. She teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

YIYUN LI is the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers; The Vagrants; Gold Boy, Emerald Girl; and Kinder Than Solitude. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the Guardian First Book Award, among others. Granta named her one of the best American novelists under thirty-five, and The New Yorker named her one of twenty American writers under forty to watch. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at the University of California, Davis.

TAO LIN is the author of the novels Taipei, Richard Yates, and Eeeee Eee Eeee; the novella Shoplifting from American Apparel; the story collection Bed; and the poetry collections Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy and you are a little bit happier than i am. His most recent book is Selected Tweets, a collaboration with Mira Gonzalez. He lives in New York City, and is at taolin.info.

KELLY LINK is the author of the collections Get in Trouble, Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters. She and Gavin J. Grant have co-edited a number of anthologies, including multiple volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and, for young adults, Monstrous Affections. She is the cofounder of Small Beer Press. Her short stories have been published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Link was born in Miami, Florida. She currently lives with her husband and daughter in Northampton, Massachusetts.

SAM LIPSYTE is the author of three novels and two short-story collections. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Tin House, NOON, The Quarterly, and The Best American Short Stories. He won the first annual Believer Book Award and was a Guggenheim fellow. He lives in New York City, where he teaches at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

MAUREEN F. MCHUGH has lived in New York; Shijiazhuang, China; Ohio; Austin, Texas; and now lives in Los Angeles, California. She is the author of two collections of stories—Mothers & Other Monsters and After the Apocalypse—and four novels, including China Mountain Zhang and Nekropolis. McHugh has also worked on alternate-reality games for Halo 2, the Watchmen, and Nine Inch Nails, among others.

DONALD RAY POLLOCK, recipient of the 2009 PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship, made his literary debut in 2008 with the critically acclaimed story collection Knockemstiff. He worked as a laborer at the Mead Paper Mill in Chillicothe, Ohio, from 1973 to 2005. He holds an MFA from Ohio State University. His work has appeared in, among other publications, EPOCH, Granta, and The New York Times.

GEORGE SAUNDERS’s most recent book of fiction, Tenth of December, which spent fourteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, won the inaugural Folio Prize in 2013 (for the best work of fiction in English) and the Story Prize (best short-story collection) and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has received MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships and the PEN/Malamud Prize for Excellence in the Short Story, and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.

SAÏD SAYRAFIEZADEH was born in Brooklyn and raised in Pittsburgh. He is the author of the story collection Brief Encounters with the Enemy, which was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fiction Prize, and the memoir When Skateboards Will Be Free. His short stories and personal essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction and a fiction fellowship from the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He lives in New York City.

CHRISTINE SCHUTT is the author of two short-story collections and three novels. Her first novel, Florida, was a National Book Award finalist; her second novel, All Souls, a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. A third novel, Prosperous Friends, was noted in The New Yorker as one of the best books of 2012. Among other honors, Schutt has twice won the O. Henry Award. She is the recipient of a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Schutt lives and teaches in New York.

ZADIE SMITH was born in north-west London in 1975. Her first novel, White Teeth, was the winner of the Whitbread Award for First Novel, the Guardian First Book Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and the Commonwealth Writers’ First Book Award. Her second novel, The Autograph Man, won the Jewish Quarterly — Wingate Literary Prize. Zadie Smith’s third novel, On Beauty, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Best Book Award (Eurasian Section) and the Orange Prize for fiction. Her most recent novel, NW, was published in 2012 and has been shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

MATHIAS SVALINA is the author of five books, including Destruction Myth, Wastoid, and a collaborative book with the photographer Jon Pack, The Depression. He lives in Denver, Colorado, where he has taught at universities and in DIY spaces and prisons. He is an editor for the independent poetry press Octopus Books and runs a Dream Delivery Service.

WELLS TOWER is the author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, a collection of short fiction. Tower was the recipient of the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for Fiction, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, a National Magazine Award for fiction, and was included in the New Yorker’s list of twenty promising writers under forty. Tower’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere.

DEB OLIN UNFERTH is the author of the memoir Revolution, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; the story collection Minor Robberies; and the novel Vacation, winner of the Cabell First Novelist Award. Her work appears in Harper’s, The New York Times, McSweeney’s, and NOON. She has received three Pushcart Prizes and grants from the Creative Capital Foundation. She is an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Her next collection is forthcoming from Graywolf Press.

CLAIRE VAYE WATKINS is the author of Battleborn, winner of the Story Prize, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, One Story, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Best of the West 2011, Best of the Southwest 2013, and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Nevada, Reno and the Ohio State University, Claire teaches at Bucknell University. Her first novel, Gold, Fame, Citrus, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books.

JOY WILLIAMS’s most recent book is The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories. She is the author of four novels — the most recent, The Quick and the Dead, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2001—and three earlier collections of stories, as well as Ill Nature, a book of essays that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Among her many honors are the Rea Award for the Short Story and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was elected to the Academy in 2006.

CHARLES YU is the author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, which was a New York Times Notable Book and named one of the best books of the year by Time magazine, as well as the story collections Third Class Superhero, for which he was named one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35, and his most recent collection, Sorry Please Thank You. He lives in southern California with his family.