fiction
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Fiction
Yamile Saied Méndez — October 16, 2020
Yamile (sha-MEE-lay) Saied Méndez is a fútbol-obsessed Argentine-American who loves meteor showers, summer, astrology, and pizza. She lives in Utah with her Puerto Rican husband and their five kids, two adorable dogs, and one majestic cat. An inaugural Walter Dean Myers Grant recipient, she’s also a graduate of Voices of Our Nations (VONA) and the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Writing for Children’s and Young Adult program. She’s a PB, MG, and YA author. Yamile is also part of Las Musas, the first collective of women and nonbinary Latinx MG and YA authors. She’s represented by Linda Camacho at Gallt & Zacker Literary.
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Fiction
Kristen Chandler — November 6, 2020
Kristen Chandler is the author of Thief of Happy Endings and the award-winning Girls Don’t Fly and Wolves, Boys, and Other Things That Might Kill Me. She was nominated for the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award. She thrives on making readers laugh, cry, and worry about what will happen next, so she isn't the nicest person in the world. She teaches Creative Writing and Composition at Brigham Young University.
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Fiction
Jack Harrell — October 9, 2020
Jack Harrell grew up in southeastern Illinois and moved west to Utah in 1981, where he joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at age 21. His first book, Vernal Promises, won the Marilyn Brown Novel Award. He is the author of A Sense of Order and Other Stories, and Writing Ourselves: Essays on Creativity, Craft, and Mormonism. His latest book is the novel Caldera Ridge.
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Fiction
Allison K. Hymas - February 28, 2020
Allison K. Hymas received both her Bachelors of Arts in English and her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from BYU. She writes poems and short stories that have been published in Rivet, FLARE, Sassafras and Dark Matter. She has also published two middle grade novels with Aladdin/Simon & Schuster, Under Locker and Key and Arts and Thefts, both about a 12-year-old boy who works as a retrieval specialist at his middle school, returning what others steal. Her next novel, The Explorer’s Code, a puzzle story about three kids who solve the mystery of an old manor house, will be released in September with Imprint/Macmillan. When she’s not writing, Allison enjoys reading, cooking, and running long distances.
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Fiction
Matt Mendez – November 15, 2020
Matt Mendez is the author of Barely Missing Everything, his YA debut novel, and the short story collection Twitching Heart. Barely Missing Everything has been called a “searing portrait of two Mexican-American families” by Publishers Weekly and “accessible and artful” in a starred review by Kirkus. The New York Times says “has an uncanny ability to capture the aimless bluster of young boys posturing at confidence.” He earned his MFA from the University of Arizona and lives with his wife and two daughters in Tucson, Arizona. You can visit him at mattmendez.com.
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Fiction
Kirstin Chen – January 31, 2020
Kirstin Chen‘s second novel, Bury What We Cannot Take, was named a best book of the year by Entropy, Popsugar, and Book Bub, and a top pick of the season by Electric Literature, The Millions, The Rumpus, Harper’s Bazaar, and InStyle. She is also the author of Soy Sauce for Beginners, an Amazon bestseller. She has received awards from the Steinbeck Fellows Program, Sewanee, Hedgebrook, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Toji Cultural Foundation, and the National Arts Council of Singapore. Her writing has appeared in Real Simple, Literary Hub, Writer’s Digest, Manrepeller, Zyzzyva, and the Best New Singaporean Short Stories. She teaches creative writing at the University of San Francisco and in Ashland University’s Low-Residency MFA Program.
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Fiction
Courtney Craggett - January 24, 2020
Courtney Craggett holds a PhD in English with specializations in creative writing and multi-ethnic American literature from the University of North Texas, where she taught English and served as the American Literary Review’s Assistant Fiction Editor. Her short stories appear in The Pinch, Mid-American Review, Washington Square Review, Booth, Juked, Word Riot, and Monkeybicycle, among others, and were featured on Ploughshares’ blog. Her reviews appear in American Microreviews and Interviews. Twice nominated for a Pushcart, Courtney is the editors’ choice winner of the 2014 Sherwood Anderson Award and the winner of The Pinch’s Spring 2017 Featured Contributor Award. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Weber State University.
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Fiction
Peter Turchi – November 8, 2019
Peter Turchi is the author of six books and the co-editor of three anthologies. His books include the New York Times bestseller A Muse and A Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic; Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer; and The Girls Next Door. His work has appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, The Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Colorado Review, among others. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The Houston Chronicle has called him “One of the country’s foremost thinkers on the art of writing.” Born in Baltimore, Turchi earned his BA at Washington College in Cherstertown, Maryland, and his MFA at the University of Arizona. He currently teaches fiction in Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers. His wife, Laura, is a professor of Teacher Education; their son is the musician Reed Turchi.
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Fiction
John Bennion – October 25, 2019
John Bennion is a fifth-generation native of Utah’s western desert. He has published a collection of short fiction, Breeding Leah and other Stories (1991), and three novels—Falling Toward Heaven (2000), An Unarmed Woman (2019), and Ezekiel’s Third Wife (2019). He has published short stories and essays in Hotel Amerika, Southwest Review, Hobart, Utah Historical Quarterly, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Best of the West II, Journal of Mormon History, High Country News, English Journal, and others. He is an associate professor in the English Department at Brigham Young University, where he teaches creative writing.
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Fiction
Tony Earley – October 4, 2019
Tony Earley is the Samuel Milton Fleming Chair in English at Vanderbilt. He received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama and has taught at Vanderbilt since 1997. He has been named one of the 'twenty best young fiction writers in America' by The New Yorker and one of the 'Best of Young American Novelists' by Granta. His books include a collection of short stores, Here We Are in Paradise: Stories (1994); a novel, Jim the Boy (2002); and a collection of personal essays, Somehow Form a Family: Stories That Are Mostly True (2001). His stories have also appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Best American Short Stores. His work has been widely anthologized as well as translated into a number of different languages.
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Ryan Ridge – April 5, 2019
RYAN RIDGE is the author of four chapbooks as well as four full-lengths, including the hybrid novel, American Homes (University of Michigan Press, 2015). His next story collection, New Bad News, is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in 2020. Past work has appeared in American Book Review, The Collagist, DIAGRAM, Los Angeles Review, Lumina, Passages North, Salt Hill, Santa Monica Review, and elsewhere. In 2016, he received the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction judged by Jonathan Lethem. An assistant professor at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, he co-directs the Creative Writing Program. In addition to his work as a writer and teacher, he edits the literary magazine, Juked. He lives in Salt Lake City with the writer Ashley Farmer.
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Fiction
Spencer Hyde – March 8, 2019
Spencer Hyde worked at a therapeutic boarding school before earning his MFA at Brigham Young University and his PhD at University of North Texas. He wrote his debut novel, Waiting for Fitz, while working as a Teaching Fellow in Denton, Texas. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Glimmer Train, Bellevue Literary Review, Five Points, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor of Fiction at Brigham Young University. Spencer and his wife, Brittany, are the parents of four children.
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Fiction
Victor Lodato – March 1, 2019
Victor Lodato is a playwright and the author of two critically acclaimed novels. Edgar and Lucy was called “a riveting and exuberant ride” by the New York Times, and his novel Mathilda Savitch, winner of the PEN USA Award, was hailed as “a Salingeresque wonder of a first novel.” Victor’s stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Best American Short Stories. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA. Born and raised in New Jersey, Victor currently divides his time between Ashland, Oregon, and Tucson, Arizona.
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Fiction
Caitlin Sangster – January 18, 2019
Caitlin Sangster grew up in the back woods of California and would rather go hiking, running, swimming, or general outdoorsing than just about anything else. If there aren’t any mountains, it doesn’t count as a real place. At eighteen, she moved to XinJiang, and at twenty-one it was Taiwan. She did eventually buckle down and graduate from Brigham Young University with a BA in Asian Studies and is now that person you avoid at parties because she’ll probably start talking about Shang dynasty oracle bones. Caitlin has been writing since middle school. She always thought of it as a silly sort of compulsive habit until she realized that people like reading stories and she liked writing them and there wasn’t much silly about that. She currently lives in Utah with her husband and four children. (photo credit: Sherri Sangster)
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Fiction
Ann Dee Ellis - November 30
Ann Dee Ellis is the author of three young adult titles including This is What I Did:, Everything is Fine, and The End or Something Like That. Her middle grade debut, You May Already Be a Winner, was released July 2017. Her books have received starred reviews and been featured on multiple lists. She teaches as an adjunct creative writing instructor at Brigham Young University and has taught at various writing conferences. She lives in the foothills of Utah and when she’s not writing, she’s hanging around with her husband and five energetic children.
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Fiction
Francisco Stork - November 9, 2018
Francisco Stork was born in Monterrey, Mexico and came to El Paso, Texas with his mother and adoptive father when he was nine-years old. He has an M.A from Harvard University and a J.D from Columbia University. He worked as an attorney until his retirement in 2015. Francisco is the author of seven novels, including Marcelo in the Real World, recipient of the Schneider Award; The Last Summer of the Death Warriors, recipient of the Elizabeth Walden Award; The Memory of Light, recipient of the Tomás Rivera Award. His latest novel Disappeared, is a 2018 Walter Dean Myers Award Honor
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