Douglas Light [1] (born Indianapolis, Indiana) is an American novelist, screenwriter, and short story writer.
Light cowrote the screen adaptation ( The Trouble with Bliss ) of his debut novel East Fifth Bliss. The film stars Golden Globe winner Michael C. Hall of Dexter fame, Lucy Liu, and Brie Larson. His story collection, Girls in Trouble, received the 2010 AWP Grace Paley Prize [2] for short fiction. It was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2011. Blood Stories was published in March 2015.
While attending graduate school at The City College of New York, he studied under Frederic Tuten and was award the Goodman Loan Fund Grant Award, the Danielle and Larry Nyman Family Project Award, and the Irwin and Alice Stark Short Fiction Prize for his writing. His first published short story, "Three Days. A Month. More." received a 2003 O. Henry Award and was selected for inclusion in the 2003 Best American Nonrequired Reading anthology, which was edited by Dave Eggers and Zadie Smith. Light's writing received a 2008 and 2010 JP Morgan Chase/NoMAA Grant and has appeared in The Alaska Quarterly Review, Guernica Magazine, Narrative , and other magazines.
He is the founding managing editor of Epiphany Magazine.
Peter Philip Carey AO is an Australian novelist.
Richard Ford is an American novelist and short story author, and writer of a series of novels featuring the character Frank Bascombe.
Conrad Michael Richter was an American novelist whose lyrical work is concerned largely with life on the American frontier in various periods. His novel The Town (1950), the last story of his trilogy The Awakening Land about the Ohio frontier, won the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His novel The Waters of Kronos won the 1961 National Book Award for Fiction. Two collections of short stories were published posthumously during the 20th century, and several of his novels have been reissued during the 21st century by academic presses.
Anthony Doerr is an American author of novels and short stories. He gained widespread recognition for his 2014 novel All the Light We Cannot See, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
David Bezmozgis is a Latvian-born Canadian writer and filmmaker, currently the head of Humber College's School for Writers.
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.
Grace Paley, née Goodside, was an American short story author, poet, teacher, and political activist.
Kelly Link is an American editor and writer. Mainly known as an author of short stories, she published her first novel The Book of Love in 2024. While some of her fiction falls more clearly within genre categories, many of her stories might be described as slipstream or magic realism: a combination of science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, and literary fiction. Among other honors, she has won a Hugo Award, three Nebula Awards, and a World Fantasy Award for her fiction, and she was one of the recipients of the 2018 MacArthur "Genius" Grant.
Robert Olen Butler is an American fiction writer. His short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993.
Allan Gurganus is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist whose work, which includes Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All and Local Souls, is often influenced by and set in his native North Carolina.
Transatlantic Review was a literary journal founded in 1959 by Joseph F. McCrindle, who remained its editor until he closed the magazine in 1977. Published quarterly, at first in Rome and then in London and New York, TR was known for its eclectic mix of short stories and poetry—by both young, previously unpublished writers and prominent authors such as Samuel Beckett, Iris Murdoch, Grace Paley and John Updike—as well as drawings, essays, and interviews with writers and theater and film directors.
Karen Russell is an American novelist and short story writer. Her debut novel, Swamplandia!, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 2009 the National Book Foundation named Russell a 5 under 35 honoree. She was also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" in 2013.
Richard Bausch is an American novelist, short story writer, and Professor in the Writing Program at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has published thirteen novels, nine short story collections, and one volume of poetry and prose.
Philip Graham is an American author, professor, and editor. He is one of the founders, and the current editor-at-large, of the literary/arts journal, Ninth Letter, which won the MLA’s Best New Literary Journal Award in 2005. He is a professor emeritus in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he received three campus-wide teaching awards. He has also taught in the low-residency MFA program of the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Additionally, he is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, two Illinois Arts Council grants, and the William Peden Prize in Fiction from The Missouri Review, as well as fellowship residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo artists' colony.
David Vann is an American novelist and short story writer, and was formerly a professor of creative writing at the University of Warwick in England. Vann received a Guggenheim Fellowship and has been a National Endowment for the Arts fellow, a Wallace Stegner fellow, and a John L'Heureux fellow. His work has appeared in many magazines and newspapers. His books have been published in 23 languages and have won 14 prizes and been on 83 'best books of the year' lists. They have been selected for TheNew Yorker Book Club, the Times Book Club, the Samlerens Bogklub in Denmark and have been optioned for film by Inkfactory and Haut et Court. He has appeared in documentaries with the BBC, CNN, PBS, National Geographic, and E!.
Salvatore Scibona is an American novelist. He has won awards for his novels as well as short stories, and was selected in 2010 as one of The New Yorker's "20 under 40: Fiction Writers to Watch". His work has been published in ten languages. In 2021 he was awarded the $200,000 Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his novel The Volunteer. In its citation the academy wrote, "Salvatore Scibona's work is grand, tragic, epic. His novel The Volunteer, about war, masculinity, abandonment, and grimly executed grace, is an intricate masterpiece of plot, scene, and troubled character. In language both meticulous and extravagant, Scibona brings to the American novel a mythic fury, a fresh greatness."
Amy M. Homes is an American writer best known for her controversial novels and unusual short stories, which feature extreme situations and characters. Notably, her novel The End of Alice (1996) is about a convicted child molester and murderer.
Doreen Baingana is a Ugandan writer. Her short story collection, Tropical Fish, won the Grace Paley Award for Short Fiction in 2003 and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first book, Africa Region in 2006. Stories in it were finalists for the Caine Prize in 2004 and 2005. She was a Caine Prize finalist for the third time in 2021 and has received many other awards listed below.
Christine Sneed is an American author — the novels Little Known Facts (2013), Paris, He Said (2015), and Please Be Advised (2022), and the story collections Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry (2010), The Virginity of Famous Men (2016), and Direct Sunlight (2023) — as well as a graduate-level fiction professor at Northwestern University who also teaches in Regis University's low-residency MFA program. She is the recipient of the Chicago Public Library Foundation's 21st Century Award, the John C. Zacharis First Book Award, the Society of Midland Authors Award, the 2009 AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, and the Chicago Writers' Association Book of the Year Award in both 2011 and 2017.
John Weir is an American writer. He is the author of two novels, The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Debut Fiction at the 2nd Lambda Literary Awards in 1990, and for which he received an NEA Fellowship in Fiction in 1991; and What I Did Wrong ; and the story collection Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me, which won the 2020 AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, and was published by Red Hen Press in 2022.