T165.
Ambition of the Short Story: Bringing the Short Form Front and Center
Thursday, March 9, 2023
12:10 pm to 1:25 pm
Storytellers go back to the beginning of human history: wandering bards, a grandmother at the kitchen table, sailors watching the stars from the bow of a ship. Yet in contemporary times, agents and publishers seem to prefer the deep dive of a novel over the compact form of the story collection. In contemplating the merits of short fiction as a genre in its own right, this conversation among four dynamic short story writers will explore the ins and outs of writing and publishing the short form.
Participants
Leslie Kirk Campbell’s debut short story collection, The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs, won the 2020 Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction. Her award-winning stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Arts & Letters, Southern Indiana Review, and The Thomas Wolfe Review. She has received fellowships at Ucross and Playa.
Daniel Olivas is the author of ten books including How to Date a Flying Mexican: New and Collected Stories (2022), and The King of Lighting Fixtures: Stories (2017). Olivas has also written for the New York Times, the Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, and La Bloga.
Sidik Fofana is a graduate of NYU’s MFA program and a public school teacher. His work has appeared in The Sewanee Review and Granta. Stories from the Tenants Downstairs, his debut short story collection, will be published by Scribner in August 2022.
Erica Plouffe Lazure's short story collection, Proof of Me and Other Stories, won the New American Press fiction award and was published in March 2022. She is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks, Sugar Mountain (2020) and Heard around Town (2015). She teaches and writes in Exeter, New Hampshire.
