Announcing the 2020 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize

Hub City Press is pleased to announce the five finalists for the 2020 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize, which is awarded to an emerging Southern writer. The winner will receive $10,000 and publication by Hub City Press of his or her short story collection.

Five finalists have been selected after two rounds of reading, and the winner will be selected by judge ZZ Packer. She is the author of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere and has been frequently published in such journals as The New Yorker and Granta. She is at work on a novel. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy in Berlin Prize and a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship. She has taught at many institutions including Princeton, where she was a Hodder Fellow; the Michener Center at the University of Texas; Vassar College; and as a Jones Lecturer at Stanford. She received her education at Yale (BA), Johns Hopkins (MA), the University of Iowa (MFA), and Stanford as a Stegner Fellow. 

The finalists are Amber Wheeler Bacon for her collection We Were Vessels, Scott Gloden for The Birds of Basra, Bill Glose for All the Ruined Men, Andrew Siegrist for All the Colors of the Rain, and Kirk Wilson for Smash and Grab: Love Stories. 

Amber Wheeler Bacon is a writer, teacher and literacy coach. She has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is on the board of directors of the South Carolina Writers Association. Her stories and essays have appeared in Five Points, Epiphany, Post Road, New Ohio Review, Witness and Crazyhorse and can be seen online at New South, CRAFT, Fiction Writers Review and Ploughshares. She is the recipient of the 2018 Breakout 8 Writers Prize from The Author's Guild and a 2020 Katherine Bakeless Nason Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers' Conference. She was recently nominated for a 2020 Best of the Net.

Scott Gloden lives and works in Memphis. His stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Glimmer Train, StoryQuarterly, Southern Humanities Review, and the Chicago Tribune.

Bill Glose spent the first part of his adulthood as a paratrooper. Now the combat veteran leads a peaceful life and reflects upon his earlier experiences. The author of five books of poetry, Glose’s stories, poems, and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The Sun, Narrative Magazine, Rattle, The Missouri Review, and The Writer. In 2011, he was named the Daily Press Poet Laureate and in 2017 he was featured by NPR on The Writer’s Almanac. His honors include the F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Story Award, the Robert Bausch Fiction Award, and the Dateline Award for Excellence in Journalism.

Andrew Siegrist is a graduate of the Creative Workshop at the University of New Orleans. His work has appeared in The Baltimore Review, Arts & Letters, The Greensboro Review, Pembroke Magazine, Fiction Southeast, Bat City Review, and elsewhere. He lives on the Cumberland River outside of Nashville, Tennessee.

Kirk Wilson’s work in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry is widely published in literary journals and anthologies. His current publications include short stories in New England Review and Idaho Review, and an Editor’s Award-winning essay in Florida Review. Kirk’s poetry collection SONGBOX will be published by Trio House Press as the winner of the 2020 Trio Award. His other awards include an NEA Fellowship and prizes in all three genres. 

The prize is named in honor of C. Michael Curtis, who has served as an editor of The Atlantic since 1963 and as fiction editor since 1982. Curtis has discovered or edited some of the finest short story writers of the modern era, including Tobias Wolff, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, and Anne Beattie. He has edited several acclaimed anthologies, including Contemporary New England Stories, God: Stories, and Faith: Stories. Curtis moved to Spartanburg, S.C. in 2006 and has taught as a professor at both Wofford and Converse Colleges in addition to serving on the editorial board of Hub City Press.

The winner and runner up of the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize will be announced across all social media platforms on Monday, December 7.