S215.
Reclaiming the Collection: Putting Together—and Selling—a Story Collection
Saturday, March 26, 2022
3:20 pm to 4:35 pm
In publishing and academic contexts, short stories almost always come with a caveat: they're not marketable or they're just what fits most easily in the workshop format. What if we stopped comparing books of short stories to novels? This panel looks at the story collection as its own art form, rather than a prelude to a debut novel. From contest to indie press to the Big Five, the panelists are writers who have come together to discuss how to write, arrange, edit, and sell a collection.
Participants
Megan Cummins is a Brooklyn-based writer and the managing editor of A Public Space. Her book, If the Body Allows It (Nebraska), was longlisted for the Story Prize and the PEN/Bingham Award for Debut Short Story Collection.
Sidik Fofana
Arinze Ifeakandu is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop where he won the Richard Yates Short Story Contest. He is a Caine Prize finalist and an A Public Space Emerging Writer Fellow. His debut collection of stories is forthcoming.
Kate Doyle is the author of the forthcoming short story collection I Meant It Once which will be published by Algonquin Books. A 2021 A Public Space Fellow, she received an MFA from NYU, and her work has appeared in No Tokens, Electric Literature, Anomaly, Cordella, and elsewhere.
Ada Zhang is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Maytag Fellow and recipient of the Richard E. Guthrie Memorial Fellowship. She is the author of a forthcoming short story collection.
