Granta / Best of Young American Novelists 3
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
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| Jesse Ball |
JESSE BALL was born in New York in 1978. He
has published six novels, a number of poetry
and prose collections, a book of drawings and a
pedagogical monograph, Notes on My Dunce Cap. His
prizewinning works of absurdity have been published
all over the world and translated into more than a
dozen languages. Ball won the Paris Review Plimpton
Prize in 2008 and currently teaches at the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago.
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| Halle Butler |
HALLE BUTLER is a Chicago-based writer. Her first
novel, Jillian, published in 2015, was called the ‘feelbad
book of the year’ by the Chicago Tribune. She has
co-written screenplays (Crimes against Humanity;
Neighborhood Food Drive), and is currently working
on her second novel.
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| Emma Cline |
EMMA CLINE is the author of The Girls, shortlisted
for the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
and the 2016 John Leonard Prize from the National
Book Critics Circle. She was awarded the 2014 Paris
Review Plimpton Prize for her story ‘Marion’ and has
been published in Tin House, the Paris Review and
Granta. She was born in California in 1989.
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| Joshua Cohen |
JOSHUA COHEN was born in Atlantic City in 1980
and now lives in Red Hook, Brooklyn. His books
include the novels Book of Numbers, Witz, A Heaven
of Others, Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin
Concerto, a short story collection, Four New Messages,
and a work of nonfiction, Attention! A (Short) History.
His latest novel, Moving Kings, will be published by
Random House in the summer of 2017.
MARK DOTEN is a Minnesota-born writer currently
living in Brooklyn. His debut novel, The Infernal,
was published by Graywolf Press in 2015. He is the
recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony
and Columbia University, where he completed an
MFA. He is the literary fiction editor at Soho Press
and teaches in Columbia’s graduate writing program.
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| Jen George |
JEN GEORGE was born and raised in Thousand
Oaks, California. She is the author of the short
story collection The Babysitter at Rest, released with
Dorothy, a publishing project, in 2016. Her writing
has appeared in BOMB, Harper’s, the Los Angeles
Review of Books, n+1 and the Paris Review Daily. She
lives in New York where she is currently at work on
a novel.
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| Rachel B. Glaser |
RACHEL B. GLASER published her first novel,
Paulina & Fran, in 2015. She is the author of the story
collection Pee on Water and the poetry collections
MOODS and HAIRDO. She studied painting and
animation at the Rhode Island School of Design and
poetry and fiction at UMass Amherst. In 2013, she
received the McSweeney’s Amanda Davis Highwire
Fiction Award. She tweets as @candle_face.
LAUREN GROFF, born in New York in 1978, is
the author of four books, including The Monsters of
Templeton, shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New
Writers. Her most recent novel, Fates and Furies,
was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award
and the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award.
Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic
and Tin House, among others. She lives in Gainesville,
Florida.
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Yaa Gyasi
Photograph by Cody Pickens |
YAA GYASI was born in Ghana and raised in
Huntsville, Alabama. Her first novel, Homegoing,
earned her the National Book Critics Circle’s
2016 John Leonard Award and the National Book
Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award. She received a BA in
English from Stanford University and an MFA from
the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she held a Dean’s
Graduate Research Fellowship. She lives in New York.
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| Garth Risk Hallberg |
GARTH RISK HALLBERG was born in Denham
Springs, Louisiana and grew up in North Carolina.
He is the author of A Field Guide to the North American
Family and City on Fire, which was named one of the
best books of 2015 by the Washington Post, the Los
Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and NPR. He
now lives in New York. ‘The Meat Suit’ is an excerpt
from his forthcoming novel.
GREG JACKSON has been a Fiction Fellow at the
Fine Arts Work Center and the MacDowell Colony,
as well as a Henry Hoyns Fellow at the University of
Virginia. He is the recipient of a 5 Under 35 award
from the National Book Foundation for his story
collection Prodigals. Jackson grew up in Maine and
now lives in Brooklyn.
SANA KRASIKOV, a Ukrainian-born writer, lived in
Georgia and Kenya before returning to the US four
years ago. In 2009 she published her first collection
of stories, One More Year. She is a Fulbright Scholar
and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the
Virginia Quarterly Review, Epoch and Zoetrope. Her
latest novel The Patriots was published this year by
Spiegel & Grau in the US and Granta Books in the UK.
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| Catherine Lacey |
CATHERINE LACEY is the author of Nobody is Ever
Missing, a novel that won a 2016 Whiting Award and
was a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions Fiction
Award. It has been translated into five languages. The
Answers is forthcoming in June 2017, an excerpt of
which appears in this issue. Her first story collection,
Certain American States, will follow. She was born in
Mississippi in 1985 and is currently based in Chicago.
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| Ben Lerner |
BEN LERNER was born in Topeka, Kansas in 1979.
He has received fellowships from the Fulbright,
Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, among
other honors. He is the author of three books of poetry
(The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw and Mean Free
Path) and two novels (Leaving the Atocha Station and
10:04). His most recent book is the monograph The
Hatred of Poetry.
KARAN MAHAJAN was born in 1984 and grew up
in New Delhi. He is the author of Family Planning
and The Association of Small Bombs, which was
a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction.
A graduate of Stanford University and the Michener
Center for Writers, he currently lives in Austin, Texas.
He has worked as an editor, a consultant for the
New York City government and a researcher in
Bangalore. ‘The Anthology’ is an extract from a
forthcoming novella.
ANTHONY MARRA, born in Washington DC, is the
author of the collection of stories The Tsar of Love and
Techno, a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics
Circle Award and winner of the 2016 American
Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family
Foundation Award. His first novel, A Constellation of
Vital Phenomena, won the inaugural National Book
Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. He has received
fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and
the National Endowment for the Arts, and is currently
the Jones Lecturer in Fiction at Stanford University.
DINAW MENGESTU was born in Ethiopia and
raised in Illinois. He is the author of three novels,
The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, How to Read
the Air and All Our Names. He is the recipient of the
2007 Guardian First Book Award, a 5 Under 35
award from the National Book Foundation and was
included in the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 selection
in 2010. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship
in 2012. His journalism and fiction have appeared in
Harper’s, Rolling Stone, the New Yorker and the Wall
Street Journal.
OTTESSA MOSHFEGH is the Boston-born author of
McGlue and Eileen, which was shortlisted for the 2016
Man Booker Prize, and the story collection Homesick
for Another World. She was awarded the Plimpton Prize
for her stories in the Paris Review, granted a creativewriting
fellowship from the National Endowment for
the Arts and served as a Wallace Stegner Fellow at
Stanford University.
CHINELO OKPARANTA is the author of Under the
Udala Trees and Happiness, Like Water. She was born
in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, received her bachelor’s
degree from Pennsylvania State University, her MA
from Rutgers University and her MFA from the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop. She is a 2014 O. Henry Award
winner, as well as a two-time Lambda Literary
Award winner. Her work was nominated for the 2016
NAACP Image Award in Fiction as well as for the
2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction. Her
stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Tin House,
the Kenyon Review and elsewhere.
ESMÉ WEIJUN WANG is a mental health advocate,
essayist and the author of the novel The Border
of Paradise. She won the 2016 Graywolf Press
Nonfiction Prize for her book of essays, The Collected
Schizophrenias. Her work has appeared in Elle,
Catapult, Hazlitt, the Believer and Lenny. She lives in
San Francisco, California.
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| Claire Vaye Watkins |
CLAIRE VAYE WATKINS was born and raised in the
Mojave Desert, California. She is a graduate of the
University of Nevada, Reno, and earned her MFA
from the Ohio State University. She is the author of
the novel Gold Fame Citrus and the story collection
Battleborn. A Guggenheim Fellow, she is also on the
teaching faculty at the Institute of American Indian
Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico and the Helen Zell
Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.
She and her husband Derek Palacio co-founded
the Mojave School, a free arts camp for teenagers in
rural Nevada.