Growing Up

Ethan Laughman is a recruitment, marketing, and communications specialist at the University of Georgia's College of Environment and Design. Among the few who have read every Flannery O'Connor Award-winning volume, he has collaborated closely with the series' authors in compiling these new anthologies.

Tony Ardizzone is the author of The Evening News, which won the 1985 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. He is the author of seven books of fiction, most recently The Arab's Ox: Stories of Morocco. His novels include The Whale Chaser, In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu, Heart of the Order, and In the Name of the Father. His work has received the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Milkweed Editions National Fiction Prize, the Chicago Foundation for Literature Award for Fiction, the Virginia Prize for Fiction, the Pushcart Prize, and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. Born and raised in Chicago, he currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

Rita Ciresi is the author of Mother Rocket, which won the 1992 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. She is author of the novels Bring Back My Body to Me, Blue Italian, Pink Slip, and Remind Me Again Why I Married You, and the story collections Sometimes I Dream in Italian and Second Wife. She is professor of English at the University of South Florida in Tampa, a faculty member for the Bay Path University online MFA program in nonfiction, and fiction editor of 2 Bridges Review.

Mary Clyde is the author of Survival Rates, which won the 1998 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Clyde was praised for her work by The New York Times: "Clyde's writing has many strengths, but the greatest one is her ability to transform a shallow experience into something resembling hope. That she does so with intelligence and wit makes this collection as good as they get." She graduated from Brigham Young University, University of Utah, with an MA, in 1977, and Vermont College, with an MFA, in 1997. She is the mother of five children: Emily Clyde Curtis, Sarah, Rachel June Jones, David, and Thomas.

Tom Kealey is the author of Thieves I've Known, which received the 2012 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. He is also the author of The Creative Writing MFA Handbook. His stories have appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Glimmer Train, Story Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, and the San Francisco Chronicle. His nonfiction has appeared in Poets and Writers and The Writer. He received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he received the Distinguished Teaching Award. Tom is a former Stegner Fellow andhas taught creative writing at Stanford University since 2003.

Carol Lee Lorenzo leads the fiction workshops at the Callanwolde Fine Arts Center in Atlanta. She has taught creative writing at Emory University, Oglethorpe University, and Georgia State University. Her short stories have appeared in Five Points,Epoch, Pennsylvania Review, Painted Bride,Chelsea, and Sou'easter, among other literary journals. Lorenzo is the author of three novels for young adults.

T. M. McNally is the author of six books of fiction, including his first, Low Flying Aircraft, which won the 1990 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. His stories have appeared in Conjunctions, DoubleTake, Yale Review, and The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. He teaches at Arizona State University.

Alyce Miller is the author of The Nature of Longing, which won the 1993 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and four other books, Sweet Love, Skunk, Water, and Stopping for Green Lights. She has also published 250 poems, essays, short stories, and articles. Her work has appeared in more than 150 journals, including Ploughshares, Iowa Review, New England Review, Southern Review, L.A. Times Summer Fiction Issue, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Story Quarterly, Story Magazine, and American Fiction, among others.

Debra Monroe is the author The Source of Trouble, which won the 1989 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. She is also the author of the story collection A Wild, Cold State; two novels, Newfangled and Shambles; and two memoirs, On the Outskirts of Normal and My Unsentimental Education. She is a "fierce" writer who presents "ever-hopeful lost souls with engaging humor and sympathy" (Kirkus Reviews), in prose that's "rangy, thoughtful, ambitious, and widely, wildly knowledgeable" (Washington Post), always "fine and funky, marbled with warmth and confusion, but not a hint of sentimentality" (Boston Globe). She lives in Austin, Texas, and teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University.

Randy F. Nelson is the author of The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men, which received the 2005 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, A Duplicate Daughter, The Overlook Martial Arts Reader, and The Almanac of American Letters. His stories have appeared in such publications as Gettysburg Review, North American Review, and Kenyon Review.

Andrew Porter is the author of The Theory of Light and Matter, which won the 2007 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. He is also author of the novel, In Between Days. His award-winning fiction has appeared in One Story, Ploughshares, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology and on NPR's Selected Shorts. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he has received a variety of fellowships including the 2004 W. K. Rose Fellowship in the Creative Arts, a Helene Wurlitzer Fellowship, and a James Michener-Paul Engle Fellowship from the James Michener/Copernicus Society of America. Porter is Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

Melissa Pritchard is the author of twelve books, including a biography and collection of essays. Her first short story collection, Spirit Seizures, won the 1988 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Carl Sandburg Award, the James Phelan Award from the San Francisco Foundation and was named a New York Times Editor's Choice and Notable Book of the Year. A five time winner of Pushcart and O. Henry Prizes and consistently cited in Best American Short Stories, Melissa has published fiction and non-fiction in such literary journals, anthologies, textbooks, magazines as The Paris Review, Ploughshares, A Public Space, Conjunctions, Agni, Ecotone, The Gettysburg Review, O, The Oprah Magazine, The Nation, the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. A recent Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellow at the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians in Columbus, Georgia, Melissa's newest novel is Tempest: The Extraordinary Life of Fanny Kemble (2021). www.melissapritchard.com.

Paul Rawlins' fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Southeast Review, Sycamore Review,Tampa Review, and Prism. He lives in Salt Lake City.

Barbara Sutton is the author of The Send-Away Girl, which won the 2003 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her stories have appeared in Agni, The Missouri Review, The Antioch Review, The Chicago Quarterly Review, The Harvard Review, Image, and other publications. She works as a government speechwriter in New York City and blogs at Sketches by Baz.

Kellie Wells teaches in the writing program at Washington University in St. Louis. Her fiction has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals.

Nancy Zafris is the author of The People I Know, recipient of the 1989 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. She is also the author of two novels, Lucky Strike and The Metal Shredders. Her second collection of short stories, The Home Jar, was named one of the top ten books of 2013 by The Minneapolis Star Tribune. After serving as the fiction editor of the Kenyon Review for nine years, she became the editor of the Flannery O'Connor award series for several years. She has recently finished a new novel.