Bernard Malamud was an American novelist and short story writer. Along with Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, he was one of the best known American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His 1966 novel The Fixer, about antisemitism in the Russian Empire, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
Michael Cunningham is an American novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for his 1998 novel The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. Cunningham is Professor in the Practice of Creative Writing at Yale University.
Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel Them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
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.
Ron Rash is an American poet, short story writer and novelist and the Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University.
Julie Orringer is an American novelist, short story writer, and professor. She attended Cornell University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She was born in Miami, Florida and now lives in Brooklyn with her husband, fellow writer Ryan Harty. She is the author of The Invisible Bridge, a New York Times bestseller, and How to Breathe Underwater, a collection of stories; her novel, The Flight Portfolio, tells the story of Varian Fry, the New York journalist who went to Marseille in 1940 to save writers and artists blacklisted by the Gestapo. The novel inspired the Netflix series Transatlantic.
Bradford Morrow is an American novelist, editor, essayist, poet, and children's book writer. Professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow at Bard College, he is the founding editor of Conjunctions literary magazine.
Deborah Eisenberg is an American short story writer, actress and teacher. She is a professor of writing at Columbia University.
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.
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. Her short story collection Wednesday's Child was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.
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).
Carolyn Cooke is an American short story writer and novelist.
Alexi Zentner is a Canadian-American short story writer, and novelist.
Manuel Muñoz is an American novelist, short story writer, and professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona.
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.
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.
Larry Dark has been the director of The Story Prize—a U.S. book award for short story collections—since its inception in 2004. He served as series editor of the O. Henry Awards for the 1997–2002 volumes. He has also compiled, edited, and introduced five other literary anthologies.
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.
Emma Cline is an American writer and novelist from California. She published her first novel, The Girls, in 2016, to positive reviews. The book was shortlisted for the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her story collection, Daddy, was published in 2020, and her second novel, The Guest, was published in 2023. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Tin House, Granta, and The Paris Review. In 2017, Cline was named one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists, and Forbes named her one of their "30 Under 30 in Media". She is a recipient of the Plimpton Prize and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
K-Ming Chang is an American novelist and poet. She is the author of the novel Bestiary (2020). Her short story collection Gods of Want won the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. In 2021, Bestiary was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
