Roxane Gay Named Judge for Flannery O’Connor Award

Writer, editor, professor, and commentator Roxane Gay has been chosen as the new judge for the University of Georgia Press’s Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Gay follows Lee K. Abbott and Nancy Zafris as the latest writer to judge the Flannery O’Connor Award competitions. The competition seeks to encourage writers of excellent short stories, and offers publication of a book-length collection and a $1,000 prize.

Gay’s writing appears in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018, Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, Harper’s Bazaar, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, Bad Feminist, Difficult Women, and Hunger: A Memoir of My Body. Gay is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel and the editor of Best American Short Stories 2018. She is currently at work on film and television projects, a book of writing advice, an essay collection about television and culture, and a YA novel entitled The Year I Learned Everything. In 2018, she won a Guggenheim fellowship. Currently, Gay is a visiting associate professor of women’s gender and sexuality studies at Yale.

“I have long admired the books published by the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction series. It is where I first encountered work from brilliant writers like Dana Johnson and Lori Ostlund,” said Gay. “To now be able to find new writers and share their short fiction with the world is both an honor and an immense pleasure.”

Submissions for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction are accepted April 1 through May 31 each year. For guidelines and more information about the award, click here.