Kealey’s collection THIEVES I’VE KNOWN and Gorman's collection THE VIEWING ROOM will be published by the University of Georgia Press and will be available in Fall 2013.
Tom Kealey’s fiction and nonfiction have been published in The Best American NonRequired Reading, Glimmer Train, Story Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Poets & Writers, Alaska Quarterly Review, Indiana Review and many other places. He is also the author of The Creative Writing MFA Handbook. Kealey's stories have won awards with the Joseph Henry Jackson Award from the San Francisco Foundation and the Glimmer Train Fiction Awards. Kealey was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and he is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford where he teaches fiction, screenwriting, and creative nonfiction. Kealey received his MFA at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he was the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award. He is an enthusiastic volunteer at 826 Valencia.
Jackie Gorman has lived in Los Angeles for the last thirty years. Her life has revolved around the medical field in many ways—as a health care lawyer, a hospital chaplain, and as a living kidney donor. She is now a mental health activist, training volunteers to speak to families whose loved ones are hospitalized in psychiatric centers and crisis centers. She grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, and published a memoir about her family, The Seeing Glass, fifteen years ago. One story in the winning collection appeared previously in Slake Magazine. She has a law degree from UCLA School of Law and an MFA in Fiction from Spalding University in Louisville.
The runners up in this year's competition are Donna Miscolta of Seattle, WA and Dinah Cox of Stillwater, OK. Additional finalists for the award are Bridgette Shade of Pittsburgh, PA; Ashlee Adams Crews of Durham, NC; Jacob Appel of Scarsdale, NY; Dave Madden of Tuscaloosa, AL; Leesa Cross-Smith of Louisville, KY; Laura Ezell of Northport, AL; Justin Kramon of Philadelphia, PA; E.G. Silverman of Skillman, NJ; Mary Specht of Abilene, TX; Nathan Oates of Brooklyn, NY; Ronald Gauthier of Atlanta, GA; Steve Street of Buffalo, NY; Joanna Campbell; Polly Buckingham of Medical Lake, WA; Brittany Newmark of Columbus, OH; Dallas Woodburn of Ventura, CA; Michele Ruby of Louisville, KY; Katherine Zlabek of Cincinnati, OH; Jenn Scott of Oakland, CA; Gregory Wolos of Alplaus, NY; Robert Yune; Matthew Salesses; Heather Sappenfield of Vail, CO; Charles Green of Ithaca, NY; Lucas Southworth of Tuscaloosa, AL; Katherine Conner of New Orleans, LA; Dwight Holing of Orinda, CA; Kate Kostelnik of Lincoln, NE; Robin McLean of Bristol, NH; Erica Plouffe Lazure of Exeter, NH; Luke Rolfes of Platte City, MO; Jessica Breheny; Lynette D’Amico of Dorchester, MA; Jacob White of Stowe, VT; and Jon Corcoran of Brooklyn, NY.
Congratulations to all for creating compelling short fiction. The award-winning books selected in last year's competition, LOVE, IN THEORY by E.J. Levy ("Sad, funny, and always wise, Levy’s stories reveal truths about how we love and lose, trust and betray") and THE INVISIBLES by Hugh Sheehy ("A little violence goes a long way and the lurking fear at the heart of these stories elevates them beyond the merely promising to reveal a wicked new talent"), will release in September and October, respectively.
