Photo/Robert Ohanesian
Colette Sartor has been named this year’s winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, a competition that seeks to encourage writers of excellent short stories, while bringing award-winning works to a wider audience. Her collection, Once Removed and Other Stories, will be published by the University of Georgia Press in the fall of 2019.
Sartor is from New Jersey but currently lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. She is the winner of several awards including a Truman Capote Fellowship from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a Glenna Luschei Award, and a Reynolds Price Short Fiction Award. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Kenyon Review Online, Carve Magazine, Slice Magazine, Colorado Review, and elsewhere.
Flannery O’Connor series editor Lee K. Abbott raves:
“Lordy, what a wallop each of these stories delivers—to the heart and the head, sure, but also to the conscience and the soul, not to mention to the myths of family that we embrace and to the vital lies peculiar to love that we cleave to. Equally stunning is Ms. Sartor’s command of craft—no cleverness for its own sake, no peekaboo, no ‘Look, Ma, no hands.’ Instead, with enviable humility and no little grace, she has subordinated herself to the needs, wishes, desires, and dreams of characters who have galvanized her imagination and engaged her empathy. Bravo.”
The finalists for this year were Michael Noll’s Bullheads, Laurie Cedilnik’s Queens’ Finest, John McNally’s The Fear of Everything, and Jacob Appel’s One Extremity Too Many.
The winning book from last year’s competition, Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum’s What We Do with the Wreckage will be published in October 2018. Copies will be available from UGA Press, major retailers, and local independent booksellers.
Congratulations to all participants, and thank you for continuing the literary craft of short fiction. Submissions for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction are accepted April 1 to May 31 each year. Visit the series page for guidelines and more information about the award.
ugapress.wordpress.com 