2015/16 Winner & Finalists

 Adam Johnson, Charles Baxter, and Colum McCann. (Event photos by Beowulf Sheehan.)

 Adam Johnson, Charles Baxter, and Colum McCann. (Event photos by Beowulf Sheehan.)

 

 Winner: Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson

Adam Johnson is the author of the story collection Fortune Smiles (Random House), winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, and The Orphan Master's Son, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the California Book Award, and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Johnson's other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Stegner Fellowship. His previous books are Emporium, a short story collection, and the novel Parasites Like Us. Johnson teaches creative writing at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco with his wife and children.



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Finalist: There's Something I Want You to Do by Charles Baxter

Charles Baxter is a winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story. There's Something I Want You to Do (Pantheon), features two stories that were selected for volumes of Best American Short Stories. His five previous collections are Gryphon, Believers, A Relative Stranger,Through the Safety Net, and Harmony of the World. He has also published the novels The Feast of Love (a finalist for the National Book Award), The Soul ThiefSaul and PatsyShadow Play, and First Light. He lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota and in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.


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Finalist: Thirteen Ways of Looking by Colum McCann

Colum McCann is the author of Thirteen Ways of Looking (Random House) and two other short story collections, Fishing the Sloe-Black River and Everything in This Country Must, as well as the novels TransAtlanticLet the Great World SpinZoliDancerThis Side of Brightness, and Songdogs. His literary honors include the National Book Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres award from the French government, and the Ireland Fund of Monaco Literary Award in Memory of Princess Grace. A contributor to The New YorkerThe New York Times MagazineThe Atlantic, and The Paris Review, he teaches in the Hunter College MFA Creative Writing program. He lives in New York City with his wife and their three children.


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The Story Prize Spotlight Award: Killing and Dying by Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly)

Adrian Tomine was born in 1974 in Sacramento, California. He began self-publishing his comic book series Optic Nerve when he was sixteen, and in 1994 he received an offer to publish from Drawn & Quarterly. His comics have been anthologized in publications such as McSweeney’s, Best American Comics, and Best American Nonrequired Reading, and his graphic novel Shortcomings was a New York Times Notable Book of the year. Since 1999, Tomine has been a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughters.


The 2015/16 Story Prize Judges