2018/19 Winner & Finalists

 Winner: Florida by Lauren Groff

Lauren Groff is a two-time National Book Award Finalist and the New York Times bestselling author of three novels, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, and Fates and Furies, as well as the celebrated short story collections Florida and Delicate Edible Birds. She has won the PEN/O. Henry Award, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, along with several Best American Short Stories anthologies, and she was named one of Granta's 2017 Best Young American Novelists. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband and sons.

Finalist: A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley

Jamel Brinkley is the author of A Lucky Man, a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction and the John Leonard Prize, and winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His writing has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2018, A Public Space, Ploughshares, American Short Fiction, and Tin House, among other places. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he was also a Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. He is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University.

Finalist: Your Duck Is My Duck by Deborah Eisenberg

Deborah Eisenberg is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of honors including the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a Whiting Writer’s Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Eisenberg has published five collections of stories: Transactions in a Foreign Currency, Under the 82ndAirborne, All Around Atlantis, Twilight of the Superheroes and Your Duck Is My Duck. Her first two story collections were republished in one volume as The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg. All four volumes were reprinted in 2010 in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (2010). She is a professor of writing at Columbia University.

The Story Prize Spotlight Award:  Half Gods by Akil Kumarasamy

Akil Kumarasamy is a writer from New Jersey. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, and Boston Review, among others. She has received fellowships from the University of Michigan, the University of East Anglia, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Schomburg Center. She is a visiting professor in fiction at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program. 

The 2018/19 Story Prize Judges

• Author Jo Ann Beard.

• Washington Post book critic Ron Charles.

• Bookseller Veronica Santiago Liu.

Photography by Beowulf Sheehan