About this Event
Part of Litquake’s Craft and the Creative Life series
“You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.” – Zadie Smith
Where does the short story collection fit in today’s literary landscape? What does this form offer—for writers and readers—not found in longer forms of fiction? How do writers evoke full lives on the page within such a confined space? In this panel, award-winning authors of short story collections discuss what draws them to writing short fiction, how the process of creating a short story collection differs from writing a novel, and the unique challenges and opportunities of the short story form. Panelists will also share lessons and insights about their own favorite short stories, and will take questions from the audience. Featuring Yang Huang, Judy Juanita, Peg Alford Pursell, Shruti Swamy, and Dallas Woodburn.
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Dallas Woodburn is the author of the short story collections How to Make Paper When the World is Ending and Woman, Running Late, in a Dress. Her debut novel, The Best Week That Never Happened, was the grand prize winner of the Dante Rossetti Book Award for young adult fiction and she is also the author of the novels Thanks, Carissa, For Ruining My Life and Before & After You & Me. A former John Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing, her short stories have been honored with the Cypress & Pine Short Fiction Award, the international Glass Woman Prize, and four Pushcart Prize nominations. She lives in Fremont with her husband and daughter.
Yang Huang grew up in Yangzhou, China and came to the U.S. to study computer science. Yang attended Boston College and earned an MFA from the University of Arizona. Her novel My Good Son won the University of New Orleans Press Publishing Lab Prize. Her story collection My Old Faithful won the Juniper Prize for fiction, and her debut novel, Living Treasures, won the Nautilus Book Award silver medal in fiction. Her essays, stories, and screenplay have appeared in Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, The Millions, Taste, The Margins, Asian Pacific American Journal, Stories for Film, and elsewhere. Yang lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and works for the University of California, Berkeley.
Judy Juanita is an award-winning poet, fiction writer, and playwright. She was born in Berkeley and raised in Oakland, and joined the nation’s first Black Student Union at San Francisco State and subsequently the Black Panther Party (BPP). She edited the BPP newspaper and while finishing her BA at SF State, and five days after graduating, she became the youngest professor of the nation’s first black studies program. Juanita’s themes explore the peculiar paths trodden by black people in California. She is the author of many books including Manhattan My Ass, You’re in Oakland; Virgin Soul; Defacto Feminism; and her new short story collection is The High Price of Freeways.
Peg Alford Pursell is the author of A Girl Goes Into the Forest and Show Her A Flower, A Bird, A Shadow, which was the Foreword Indies Book of the Year for Literary Fiction in 2017. She is the founder and director of WTAW Press and of the reading series Why There Are Words, and a member of The Writers Grotto. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Her work has been published in numerous journals including Connotation Press, RHINO, Permafrost, The Los Angeles Review, Woven Tales Press, and many other journals and anthologies.
Shruti Swamy is author of the story collection A House Is a Body, which was a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Prize, the LA Times First Fiction Award, and longlisted for the Story Prize. Her novel The Archer was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and won the California Book Award for fiction. The winner of two O. Henry Awards, her work has appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeny's, AFAR Magazine, and The New York Times. She is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, A Steinbeck Fellowship from San Jose State University, and grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the San Francisco Arts Council, and Vassar College. She is a Kundiman Fiction Fellow, and lives in San Francisco.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Southern Exposure, 3030 20th Street, San Francisco, United States
USD 20.00