The nine short stories collected here, selected by our judge and panel of readers from a pool of over five hundred stories, admirably showcase the range, vitality, and distinction of the contemporary literary short story. Kimberly Willardson's winning story, "Winter Memories of the Summer Bear," was chosen from the 2008 contest's nine ?nalists by our judge, Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler.
Miriam Gershow's debut novel, THE LOCAL NEWS, was published by Spiegel & Grau in February 2009. It has been called "unusually credible and precise" and "deftly heartbreaking" by The New York Times, as well as "an accomplished debut" (Publisher's Weekly) with a "disarmingly unsentimental narrative voice" (Kirkus Reviews).
Miriam was born in Detroit, lived briefly in Philadelphia, and spent the majority of her childhood and adolescence in the Detroit suburbs. She graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with a degree in women's studies before moving to Oregon in 1994. She has worked as a life skills trainer for runaway and homeless youth, an office manager, a short order cook, and a state bureaucrat. She co-founded a non-profit organization that advocated for the rights of recipients of public mental health services. In 2000, she returned to school at the University of Oregon, where she received her MFA in fiction.
Miriam is the recipient of the James C. McCreight Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, as well as an Oregon Literary Fellowship from Literary Arts in Portland OR. Her stories appear in The Georgia Review, Quarterly West, Black Warrior Review, Nimrod International Journal, The Journal, and Gulf Coast, among others journals. Miriam's stories have been listed in the 100 Distinguished Stories of The Best American Short Stories 2007 and appeared in the 2008 Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories. She is a past winner of the AWP Intro Journals award and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Miriam has taught fiction writing at the University of Wisconsin and Portland State University, as well as descriptive writing to gifted high school students through Johns Hopkins University. She currently lives in Eugene with her husband and son, where she is working on her next novel and teaching in the English department at the University of Oregon.
