Photo provided by Tom Rankin
The 2020 Larry Brown Short Story Award Issue
Award Winner: “Word of the Day” by Scott Gould
Second Prize: “The Night People” by Jules Hogan
Third Prize: “Blowing the Dam” by Schuyler Dickson
Finalist: “Everything That’s Lovely” by Gina Willner-Pardo
Finalist: “Blue House” by Kent Viramontes Hale
2020 Guest Judge: Jill McCorkle
Jill McCorkle has the distinction of having her first two novels published on the same day in 1984. Of these novels, The New York Times Book Review said, “One suspects the author of The Cheer Leader is a born novelist, with July 7th, she is also a full grown one.” Since then she has published four other novels—her latest, Hieroglyphics coming July 2020—and four collections of short stories.
Five of her books have been named New York Times notable books. McCorkle has received the New England Booksellers Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature and the North Carolina Award for Literature. She is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
Four of her stories have been tabbed for Best American Short Stories and several have been collected in New Stories from the South. Her short stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Oxford American, The Southern Review, Narrative Magazine and The American Scholar among others. Her story “Intervention” is included in the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. An essay, “Cuss Time,” originally published in The American Scholar was selected for Best American Essays. Other essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Garden and Gun, Southern Living, Our State, Allure and Real Simple.
McCorkle has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, Tufts, and Brandeis where she was the Fannie Hurst Visiting Writer. She was a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard for five years where she also chaired Creative Writing. She currently teaches creative writing in the MFA Program at NC State University and is a core faculty member of the Bennington College Writing Seminars. She is a frequent instructor in the Sewanee Summer Writers Program .
She lives with her husband, photographer Tom Rankin, in Hillsborough, NC.
Read “Cuss Time” and “Me and Big Foot” on The American Scholar website.
