Our 2016 Fiction Prize Judge is Aimee Bender, author of five books including the short story collection The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, a New York Times notable book. In this interview, she discusses writing process, the importance of sound, and words of advice for Fiction Prize submitters.
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Aimee Bender is the author of five books,
including The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Tin House, and more, as well as heard on This American Life and Selected Shorts. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches creative writing at USC.
Keetje Kuipers has been the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College. A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, her poems, essays, and fiction have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best American Poetry. Her first book of poetry, Beautiful in the Mouth, won the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was published by BOA Editions. Her second collection, The Keys to the Jail, was published by BOA in 2014. Keetje is an Assistant Professor at Auburn University where she is Editor of Southern Humanities Review.