On September 10 at 11am NYC we will be hosting a Flash Fiction America reading featuring 11 of the 12 SmokeLong stories in the Norton anthology that came out in February this year. This event is free. To request an invitation, please send us an email at editor@smokelong.com.
In addition to the 11 superstars below, we are thrilled that Sherrie Flick, co-editor of Flash Fiction America, will also make an appearance!
The SmokeLong Authors appearing on September 10…
Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Story Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Paris Review, and others. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship in 2014 and several Pushcart prize nominations. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize for fiction, which resulted in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017. In 2018 she earned a place as a finalist for the PEN/Bingham award for debut fiction, finalist for the NYPL Young Lions award and was recipient of the PEN America Los Angeles literary prize in fiction. Blackburn’s second collection of stories is How to Wrestle a Girl, 2021, finalist for a Lambda Literary Prize and was a NYTimes editor’s choice. Her debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, will be published January of 2024 and is about the mania of grief, all of human history and a lesbian assassin at the end of the world. She is the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities of color: livewriteworkshop.com. Her home town is Compton, California, and she is an Associate Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.
Molly Giles‘ second novel, THE HOME FOR UNWED HUSBANDS, has just been published by Leapfrog Press. She has published a previous novel and five award winning collections of short stories. Her memoir, LIFE SPAN, is coming out in Spring 2024.
Gwen E. Kirby is the author of the debut collection Shit Cassandra Saw. She has an MFA from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati. Her stories appear in One Story, Tin House, Guernica, Mississippi Review, Ninth Letter, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Currently, she is the associate director of programs and finance for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
Patricia Quintana Bidar is a Western writer from the Port of Los Angeles area. Her work has been featured in Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Pinch, Pidgeonholes, Flash Fiction America, The Best Small Fictions 2023, and Best Microfiction 2023. She is a submissions editor at SmokeLong Quarterly and a Prose Reader for Quarterly West. Patricia lives with her family and unusual dog outside of Oakland, CA. Her first collection of short fiction, Pardon Me For Moonwalking, will be published by Unsolicited Press in 2025.
Pete Stevens is the author of the chapbook Tomorrow Music (Map Literary). His story “Riders” won the Craft Literary Short Fiction Contest, judged by Robert Lopez. His fiction has appeared in AGNI, The Journal, and Copper Nickel, has been named as a Best American Short Stories Distinguished Story, and has been anthologized in Flash Fiction America (Norton, 2023). He can be found online at petestevensfiction.com.
Aubrey Hirsch is the author of a short story collection, Why We Never Talk About Sugar, and a flash fiction chapbook, This Will Be His Legacy. Her stories, essays, and comics have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME Magazine, American Short Fiction, Black Warrior Review and elsewhere. You can find her on instagram as @aubreyhirsch.
Kara Vernor‘s fiction and essays have appeared in Ninth Letter, Gulf Coast, The Normal School, The Los Angeles Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere. She has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference, and her writing has been selected for The Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, The Wigleaf Top 50, and the W. W. Norton anthology, Flash Fiction America. Her chapbook, Because I Wanted to Write You a Pop Song, is available from Split Lip Press.
Nicole Rivas (she/her) is a prose writer with stories anthologized in The Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction America. Her first full-length short story collection, Tender Hoof: Stories, is forthcoming from Thirty West Publishing in 2024. For more on Nicole and her writing, visit her at www.nicolemrivas.com.
Nicole Simonsen is a writer from northern California. Her short stories have appeared in places like SmokeLong Quarterly, Washington Square Review, and Salamander, where she won the Fiction Prize in 2021. She has a story forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review. You can find more of her work at www.nicolesimonsen.com.
Jasmine Sawers is a Kundiman fellow and Indiana University MFA alum. Their fiction and creative nonfiction has appeared in such journals as Ploughshares, Foglifter, and Wigleaf. Their book, THE ANCHORED WORLD, was a finalist for the 2023 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. They serve as an associate fiction editor for Fairy Tale Review and teach creative writing outside of academia. Originally from Buffalo, Sawers now lives outside St. Louis.
Utahna Faith writes fiction and prose poetry. She lives in Southern Indiana, and also part-time in New Orleans. She loves to travel.
A SmokeLong Summer 24!