Arna Bontemps Hemenway is an American author and professor most known for his book Elegy on Kinderklavier, [1] which won the PEN/Hemingway Prize, was a finalist for the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, and was long-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize. [2] Today, he is an associate professor of creative writing at Baylor University. [3] He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Jin Xuefei is a Chinese-American poet and novelist using the pen name Ha Jin (哈金). Ha comes from his favorite city, Harbin. His poetry is associated with the Misty Poetry movement.
Chang-rae Lee is a Korean-American novelist and a professor of creative writing at Stanford University. He was previously Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton and director of Princeton's Program in Creative Writing.
Susan Choi is an American novelist.
The PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel is awarded annually to a full-length novel or book of short stories by an American author who has not previously published a full-length book of fiction. The award is named after Ernest Hemingway and funded by the Hemingway family and the Ernest Hemingway Foundation/Society. It is administered by PEN America. Mary Hemingway, a member of PEN, founded the award in 1976 both to honor the memory of her husband and to recognize distinguished first books of fiction.
George Saunders is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children's books, and novels. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's, and GQ. He also contributed a weekly column, American Psyche, to The Guardian's weekend magazine between 2006 and 2008.
Alan Kent Haruf was an American novelist.
Ron Rash is an American poet, short story writer and novelist and the Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University.
Nathan Englander is an American short story writer and novelist. His debut short story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, was published by Alfred A. Knopf, in 1999. His second collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, won the 2012 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Yiyun Li is a Chinese-born writer and professor in the United States. Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End, and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.
The PEN/Malamud Award and Memorial Reading honors "excellence in the art of the short story", and is awarded annually by the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. The selection committee is composed of PEN/Faulkner directors and representatives of Bernard Malamud's literary executors. The award was first given in 1988.
Joan Silber is an American novelist and short story writer. She won the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and the 2018 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her novel Improvement.
Ben Fountain is an American writer currently living in Dallas, Texas. He has won many awards including a PEN/Hemingway award for Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories (2007) and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for his debut novel Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2012).
Jennifer Natalya Fink is an American author working in experimental feminist and queer fiction. She is best known for her novels Burn, V, and The Mikvah Queen, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. Her novel, Bhopal Dance (2018), won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize in 2017.
Lily King is an American novelist.
NoViolet Bulawayo is the pen name of Elizabeth Zandile Tshele, a Zimbabwean author. In 2012, the National Book Foundation named her a "5 under 35" honoree. She was named one of the Top 100 most influential Africans by New African magazine in 2014. Her debut novel, We Need New Names, was shortlisted for the 2013 Booker Prize, and her second novel, Glory, was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, making her "the first Black African woman to appear on the Booker list twice".
The PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection is awarded by the PEN America "to exceptionally talented fiction writers whose debut work — a first novel or collection of short stories ... represent distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise." The winner is selected by a panel of PEN Members made up of three writers or editors. The PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize was originally named the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers. The prize awards the debut writer a cash award of US$25,000.
Douglas Trevor is an American author and academic. He received the Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for his first book, a collection of stories entitled The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space (2005). His other books include The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (2004), the novel Girls I Know (2013), which won the 2013 Balcones Fiction Prize, and most recently the short story collection The Book of Wonders. He teaches in the English Department and Creative Writing Program at the University of Michigan, and is a former Director of the Helen Zell Writers' Program.
We Need New Names is the 2013 debut novel of expatriate Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo. A coming-of-age story, We Need New Names tells of the life of a young girl named Darling, first as a 10-year-old in Zimbabwe, navigating a world of chaos and degradation with her friends, and later as a teenager in the Midwest United States, where a better future seems about to unfold when she goes to join an aunt working there.
Molly Antopol is an American fiction and nonfiction writer. As of 2016, she is the Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. Her primary research interests include the Cold War and the Middle East.
Sequoia Nagamatsu is an American novelist, short story writer, and professor.