Congratulations to Karin Lin-Greenberg and Monica McFawn, this year's winners of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction! The competition, now celebrating its 30th anniversary, continues to be a celebrated route to publication for literary short fiction collections. UGA Press is glad to have Lin-Greenberg and McFawn carry on this tradition.Lin-Greenberg’s FAULTY PREDICTIONS and McFawn’s BRIGHT SHARDS OF SOMEPLACE ELSE will be published by the University of Georgia Press and will be available in fall 2014.
Karin Lin-Greenberg's stories have appeared in The Antioch Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Epoch, Kenyon Review Online, The North American Review, Redivider, and elsewhere. Currently, she is an assistant professor at Siena College, where she teaches creative writing.
Flannery O’Connor series editor Nancy Zafris on Lin-Greenberg’s collection: “The many, diverse tales in this collection deliver the realism and emotional heft of a Chekhov story: full, total experiences that pause along the way for laughter and insight into the human condition. The author is a sublime chameleon who takes us deep into lives so varied and different that a map of the characters would simply read: The World.”
Monica McFawn has published fiction, poetry, and is currently working on a play. Her work has appeared in journals such as the Georgia Review, Confrontation, Gargoyle, Web Conjunctions, Conduit, Hotel Amerika, and others. McFawn holds an MFA in poetry from Western Michigan University and currently teaches in the writing department at Grand Valley State University. In her spare time, McFawn trains her Welsh Cob cross pony in dressage and jumping.
Nancy Zafris on McFawn’s collection: “The writing and language soar in these amazing, unusual, funny stories that whip away that familiar rug under our feet and turn it into a magic carpet. Journeys through the initially familiar terrain of babysitting or the death of a pet paint new constellations in the sky, and the reader, really, must look up in wonder.”
The finalists in this year’s competition are Thomas Benz of Evanston, IL; MaryEllen Beveridge of Cambridge, MA; Polly Buckingham of Medical Lake, WA; Serena Crawford of Portland, OR; Geeta Kothari of Pittsburgh, PA; James Mathews of Adamstown, MD; Ann Ryles of Moraga, CA; Jay Shearer of Chicago, IL; Adam Stumacher of Jamaica Plain, MA; and Seth Brady Tucker of Lafayette, CO.
Congratulations to all participants and thank you for creating compelling short fiction. The award-winning books selected in last year's competition, THIEVES I'VE KNOWN by Tom Kealey and THE VIEWING ROOM by Jacqueline Gorman will release this month.
