Friday, August 05, 2011

Winners Announced for the Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Award

Congratulations to E.J. Levy and Hugh Sheehy, this year's winners of the Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Award! The competition, now in its twenty-eighth year, is one of the most prestigious routes to publication for literary short fiction collections; previous winners include writers such as Ha Jin and Antonya Nelson.

Levy's collection MY LIFE IN THEORY and Sheehy's collection THE INVISIBLES will be published by the University of Georgia Press and will be available in Fall 2012.

Hugh Sheehy's fiction has been published in Crazyhorse, Glimmer Train, The Kenyon Review, The Antioch Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, The New Orleans Review, Southwest Review, Redivider and in the anthology The Best American Mystery Stories 2008. He lives in Brooklyn. This is his first book.

E.J. Levy’s anthology, Tasting Life Twice: Literary Lesbian Fiction by New American Writers, won a Lambda Literary Award and was “highly recommended” by Library Journal, which called it “beautiful, sad, sweet, moving, and defiant.” Her essays have appeared in Best American Essays, The New York Times, The Nation, Orion, Salmagundi, Kenyon Review, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: 1970 to the Present; her fiction has been published in the Paris Review, Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, and North American Review, among other fine publications. Her memoir Amazons: A Love Story is forthcoming.

The runner up in this year's competition is Alison Baker of Lexington, VA. Additional finalists for the award are Gilbert Allen of Travelers Rest, SC; Ellyn Bache of Greer, SC; Lois Bassen of Lincoln, RI; Sterling Bennett of Laredo, TX; Thomas Benz of Evanston, IL; Mark Brazaitis of Morgantown, WV; Polly Buckingham of Medical Lake, WA; Daniel Coshnear of Guerneville, CA; Janice Deal of Downers Grove, IL; Elizabeth Eslami of Branford, CT; Valerie Fioravanti of Sacramento, CA; Gary Gildner of Grangeville, ID; Suzanne Greenberg of Long Beach, CA; Dawn Houghton of Salt Lake City, UT; Tom Kealey of Greensboro, NC; Laura Krughoff of Chicago, IL; Lynne Kutsukake of Toronto, ON; Karen Laws of Berkeley, CA; Nikki Nojima Louis of Seattle, WA; Kelly Luce of Santa Cruz, CA; Brendan Mathews of Lenox, MA; Nina McConigley of Laramie, WY; Robin McLean of Bristol, NH; Kyle Mellen of Fairbanks, AK; Keya Mitra of Spokane, WA; Andy Mozina of Kalamazoo, MI; Nathan Oates; Dan Pope of West Hartford, CT; Glen Pourciau; Susan Rodgers of Corvallis, OR; Laura Schadler of San Francisco, CA; Jenn Scott of Oakland, CA; Hasanthika Sirisena of Rocky Mount, NC; Adam Sturtevant of Brooklyn, NY; D.J. Thielke of Houston, TX; Steve Yates of Flowood, MS; and Jenny Zhang of Iowa City, IA.

Congratulations to all for creating compelling short fiction. The award-winning books selected in last year's competition, AT-RISK by Amina Gautier("In these always engaging stories, Gautier reminds us that behind the disturbing headlines are vibrant young people whose lives matter immeasurably") and BEAR DOWN BEAR NORTH by Melinda Moustakis ("In this sharply-crafted debut collection, Moustakis invites readers into a world filled with gruff characters, breathtaking wilderness, and a fierceness of spirit as crisp as the Alaskan winter"), will release in September.