Lauren Groff will judge the 2018 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize

Hub City Press announces Lauren Groff will judge of the 2018 $10,000 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize.

Lauren Groff is the New York Times bestselling author of three novels, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, and Fates and Furies, and the celebrated short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida, which was published in June by Riverhead. Her work has appeared in journals including the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Tin House, One Story, and Ploughshares, and in the anthologies 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and five editions of the Best American Short Stories.

The inaugural winner of the prize was Emily W. Pease for her collection Let Me Out Here, to be published in March 2019 by Hub City Press. Prize judge Lee K. Abbott said of the collection, “[Pease’s] is a style as deft as it is nuanced, her touch as light as it is sharp.” Emily W. Pease graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in English and a concentration in journalism. She went on to receive an MA from Virginia Tech and an MFA in Writing from Warren Wilson College. Her stories have appeared in the Missouri Review, the Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Crazyhorse, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Narrative, and Witness. She lives in Williamsburg, VA.

The prize is open to emerging writers in thirteen Southern states. Submitters must currently reside in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia or West Virginia, and must have no previously published books of fiction. Submissions open on December 1, 2018 and will close April 15, 2019.

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 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. This prize is made possible by an anonymous contribution from a South Carolina donor.