We’re happy to introduce the ten authors selected by Amy Hempel to appear in the fifth volume of our anthology, a collection of stories showcasing today’s best emerging writers. Congratulations again to this talented group. The anthology publishes on October 1, 2016.
A.E. Kulze, “Detail”
A.E. Kulze is a writer from Charleston, South Carolina. She worked as a journalist in New York City for four years before attending the University of Wyoming where she is currently an MFA candidate in Fiction. Her work was selected by Claire Vaye Watkins as the winner of the 2016 Tennessee Williams Fiction Contest and is forthcoming in Louisiana Literature and Nat. Brut.
Andrés Carlstein, “The Lindbergh Baby”
Andrés Carlstein received his MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was an Arts Fellow. He has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow, a Yaddo Residency Fellow, and was also a 2015-16 Center of the West Fellow. His short stories have been finalists for the Doug Fir Fiction Prize and the Gertrude Stein Fiction Award, and his work has appeared online in The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review. He is also the author of the nonfiction travelogue Odyssey to Ushuaia, a Motorcycling Adventure from New York to Tierra del Fuego. He currently works as a Lecturer of scientific writing at the University of Iowa, where he is also completing his novel, The Red Gaucho, which was a finalist for the Faulkner Society’s 2014 Novel-in-Progress Award.
Eliza Robertson, “The Pirates of Penance”
Eliza Robertson was born in Vancouver and grew up on Vancouver Island. She attended the creative writing programs at the University of Victoria and the University of East Anglia, where she received the 2011 Man Booker Scholarship. In 2013, she co-won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her first collection, Wallflowers, was shortlisted for the Canadian Authors Association Emerging Writer Award, the Danuta Gleed Short Story Prize, the East Anglia Book Award, and selected as a New York Times Editor’s Choice. In 2015, she was named by Joseph Boyden as one of five emerging writers for the Writers’ Trust Five x Five program. She lives in England.
Jonathan Durbin, “Cough”
Jonathan Durbin’s fiction has appeared in One Story, New England Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Catapult and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and is is a former fellow of the Writers’ Institute at the City University of New York. He is currently working on a novel and a collection of short stories.
Jonathan Nehls, “Communion”
Jonathan Nehls is a graduate of the Bilingual MFA Program at the University of Texas at El Paso. Originally from Denver, he lives in El Paso and teaches in El Paso and Las Cruces, New Mexico. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Gulf Stream, The Ilanot Review, and New Haven Review.
Josie Sigler, “We Were The Drowners”
Josie Sigler is the author of The Galaxie and Other Rides, a collection of stories about growing up in post-industrial Detroit, and a book of poems, living must bury, which won the Motherwell Prize and was published by Fence Books. Josie completed a PEN Northwest Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Residency, in which a writer lives for six months on a remote homestead above Rogue River in southern Oregon’s Klamath Mountains; this is where the story included here was drafted. Josie has received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. The draft of her first novel recently won the James Jones First Novel Fellowship.
Kari Shemwell, “This Road May Flood”
Kari Shemwell grew up in western Kentucky. She has studied writing at Murray State University and Sierra Nevada College. She now lives in New Orleans, where she works in the film industry.
Katie Young Foster, “Alkali Lake”
Katie Young Foster grew up in the Sandhills of Nebraska. She is an MFA candidate and the recipient of the 2016-17 Creative Writing Fellowship at the Curb Center at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. In 2015, her work received the Honorable Mention from the Zoetrope All-Story Short Fiction Contest. Her stories have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Cowboy Jamboree, and elsewhere on the web.
Laurie Baker, “Hippos”
Laurie Baker’s work has appeared in Narrative magazine, Ploughshares, Hippocampus, and Spork. She has a story forthcoming in Arts & Letters. She was awarded the Larry Levis Post-Graduate stipend to complete a collection of stories. She has just finished a novel-in-stories about South Africa titled How We Entertain Ourselves in Isolation. She lives in Medfield, MA with her husband and two daughters.
Shubha Venugopal, “Climb On”
Shubha Venugopal holds an MFA in fiction from Bennington College and a PhD in English from the University of Michigan. She teaches at the California State University, Northridge. She was recently named a finalist in the WC&C Scholarship award offered by the AWP. Her work has appeared in Potomac Review, Kartika Review, Post Road Magazine, Storyglossia, Word Riot, Mslexia, and other journals, and in the anthologies, A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection and the Robert Olen Butler Short Fiction Prize, 2009. She has also placed in competitions run by Glimmer Train, and The Atlantic Monthly, and was shortlisted for the Fish Publishing international poetry contest.