Joyce Carol Oates Prize: 2020 Finalists
We are pleased to announce the 2020 Shortlist Finalists for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, sponsored by the Simpson Literary Project. The Prize has been awarded annually since 2017. The Prize Recipient will receive $50,000 and give readings and make appearances in the Bay Area. The Recipient will also be in week-long residence during the Spring Semester 2021 at the University of California, Berkeley, English Department and the Lafayette Library and Learning Center. The Shortlist Finalists will receive $1,500 for participating in Simpsonistas, the yearly anthology of the Simpson Literary Project.
Chris Bachelder
Chris Bachelder received his MFA from the University of Florida. He is the author of four novels, most recently The Throwback Special, which was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award, the winner of the Terry Southern Prize from the Paris Review, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and a best book of the year from Esquire, Seattle Times, Kirkus, Vox, and Men’s Journal. His other novels are Bear v. Shark (2001), U.S.! (2006), and Abbott Awaits (2011). A 2017 recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, Bachelder teaches fiction writing at the University of Cincinnati. He lives in Cincinnati with his wife and two daughters.
Chris Bachelder reads from The Throwback Special as a 2016 National Book Award Finalist
Photo by Beowulf Sheehan
Maria Dahvana Headley
Maria Dahvana Headley is the New York Times-bestselling author of The Mere Wife, a contemporary adaptation of Beowulf, named by the Washington Post as one of its Notable Works of Fiction in 2018. Her new translation of Beowulf is due from FSG in August 2020. She has published three previous novels, including Queen of Kings and YA novels Magonia and Aerie. With Neil Gaiman, she edited the anthology Unnatural Creatures to benefit 826DC, and with Kat Howard, she wrote The End of the Sentence, one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014. Her internationally bestselling memoir, The Year of Yes, was published in more than a dozen languages. Headley’s short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula, Shirley Jackson, Tiptree, and World Fantasy Awards and has been anthologized in many year’s bests; a collection will appear from FSG in the near future. Her essays on politics, propaganda, and mythology have been published in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Harvard’s Nieman Storyboard, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by The MacDowell Colony, Arte Studio Ginestrelle, and the Sundance Institute’s Theatre Lab, among other organizations. She grew up in the high desert of Idaho on a survivalist sled dog ranch, where she spent summers plucking the winter coat from her father’s wolf.
NPR Author Interview with Maria Dahvana Headley, “Beowulf In The Suburbs? 'The Mere Wife' Is An Epic Retelling” (July, 2018)
Rebecca Makkai
Rebecca Makkai’s latest novel, The Great Believers, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; it was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal, the Stonewall Book Award, and the LA Times Book Prize, among others; and it was one of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of 2018. Her other books are the novels The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, and the collection Music for Wartime -- four stories from which appeared in The Best American Short Stories. Rebecca is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University, and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago. She lives in Chicago with her husband and children.
Daniel Mason
Daniel Mason is a physician and author of The Piano Tuner (2002), A Far Country (2007), The Winter Soldier (2018), and A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (2020). His work has been translated into 28 languages, awarded the Northern California Book Award for Fiction, and shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. The Piano Tuner was produced as an opera by Music Theatre Wales, and adapted to the stage by Lifeline Theatre. His short stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s, Zoetrope: All Story and Lapham’s Quarterly; in 2014 he was a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A Clinical Assistant Professor in the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry, his research and teaching interests include the subjective experience of mental illness and the influence of literature, history, and culture on the practice of medicine.
Peter Orner
Chicago-born Peter Orner is the author of five books of fiction, including the novels, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (2006) and Love and Shame and Love (2010), and the story collections, Esther Stories (2001, 2013, with a new foreword by Marilynne Robinson), Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge (2013), and most recently, Maggie Brown & Others (2019). Orner's essay collection, Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Reading to Live and Living to Read (2016) was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He is also the editor of three books of oral history for the Voice of Witness series, Underground America (2008), Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives (2011), and Lavil: Life, Love, and Death in Port-au-Prince (2017). His stories and essays have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, The Believer, and the Paris Review, as well as in Best American Short Stories. Orner has received Guggenheim and Lannan Foundation fellowships, a California Book Award, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish Writing, and two Pushcart Prizes. Orner is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and lives with his family in Norwich, Vermont.
Photo by Bill Wadman
Dexter Palmer
Dexter Palmer is the author of three novels: The Dream of Perpetual Motion (St. Martin's Press, 2010), selected as one of the best debuts of 2010 by Kirkus Reviews; Version Control (Pantheon, 2016), selected as one of the best novels of 2016 by GQ, The San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Buzzfeed, and other publications; and, most recently, Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen (Pantheon, 2019). He holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Princeton University, and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Dexter Palmer, Talks at Google: Giving Birth to Rabbits (January, 2020)
Kevin Wilson
Kevin Wilson is the author of two collections, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth(Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009), which received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award, and Baby You’re Gonna Be Mine (Ecco, 2018), and three novels, The Family Fang (Ecco, 2011), Perfect Little World (Ecco, 2017) and Nothing to See Here (Ecco, 2019). His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, One Story, A Public Space, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Rivendell, and the KHN Center for the Arts. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his sons, Griff and Patch, where he is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of the South.
