The three finalists Anthony Doerr, Yiyun Li, and Suzanne Rivecca, will read selections from their respective work, Memory Wall; Golden Boy, Emerld Girl, and Death is Not an Option, after which director Larry Dark will interview each writer on- stage. At the end of the event, founder Julie Lindsey will announce the winner and present that author with $20,000 and an engraved silver bowl. The two runners-up will each receive $5,000. This year's judges are California bookseller Marie du Vaure, Granta Editor John Freeman, and author Jayne Anne Phillips.
Previous winners of The Story Prize are The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat, The Hill Road by Patrick O'Keeffe, The Stories of Mary Gordon by Mary Gordon, Like You'd Understand, Anyway by Jim Shepard, Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff, and, most recently, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniel Mueenuddin.
Anthony Doerr is the author of three other books: The Shell Collector, About Grace, and Four Seasons in Rome. His short fiction has won three O. Henry Awards and two Pushcart Prizes, and it has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. Other awards include the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and the National Magazine Award for Fiction. In 2007, Granta named Doerr to its Best of Young American novelists list.
Yiyun Li is also the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Vagrants. She is a native of Beijing, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and a MacArthur Foundation fellow. She has won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, a Whiting Writers' Award, and the Guardian First Book Award. In 2007, Granta named her to its Best of Young American novelists list, and in 2010, The New Yorker named her as one of its top 20 fiction writers under 40. Her work has also appeared in A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and other publications. She teaches at the University of California, Davis.
Suzanne Rivecca's first book was a New York Times Editor's Choice selection and was named a Best Book of 2010 by the San Francisco Chronicle and NPR.org. Stories from the collection have received the Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and inclusion in two editions of Best New American Voices. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, she worked for years in San Francisco's homeless services sector. She currently lives in Boston, where she is a Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
For more on The Story Prize please visit http://www.thestoryprize.org.
Sponsored by The Story Prize and the New School Writing Program.
MFA WRITING | http://www.newschool.edu/writing
THE NEW SCHOOL FOR GENERAL STUDIES | http://www.newschool.edu/generalstudies
THE NEW SCHOOL | http://www.newschool.edu
Bio
Larry Dark
Larry Dark is the director of The Story Prize, an annual book award for short story collections. He served as series editor for the O. Henry Awards from 1997 to 2002, and before that compiled, edited, and introduced four literary anthologies.
Anthony Doerr
author
Yiyun Li
author
Julie Lindsey
Julie Lindsey is the founder of The Story Prize.
Robert Polito
Robert Polito holds a doctorate from Harvard University. He is director of the New School Writing Program and author of Doubles (poems), Savage Art: A Life of Jim Thompson (winner of Natl. Book Critics Circle Award and an Edgar), A Reader's Guide to James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover, and At the Titan's Breakfast: Three Essays on Byron's Poetry.
He is co-editor of Fireworks: The Lost Writings of Jim Thompson and editor of Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Polito is therecipient of Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill fellowships, and his poems and essays have been featured in Best American Poetry of 1991, Walk on the Wild Side: American Urban Poetry Since 1975, the New Yorker, and other publications. He is a contributing editor to BOMB, Pequod, and the Boston Review.