bestmicrofiction 2020

Michael Martone's recent books are The Moon Over Wapakoneta; Brooding; Winesburg, Indiana; Four for a Quarter; Not Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fiction from the Flyover; Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins, a collection of essays; and Double-wide, his collected early stories. Michael Martone, is a memoir in contributor’s notes. Unconventions: Writing on Writing and Rules of Thumb, edited with Susan Neville, are craft books. He is also the author of The Blue Guide to Indiana, published by FC2. The University of Georgia Press published his book of essays, The Flatness and Other Landscapes, winner of the AWP Award for Nonfiction, in 2000. With Robin Hemley, he edited Extreme Fiction. With Lex Williford, he edited The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction and The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. Martone is the author of five other books of short fiction including Seeing Eye; Pensées: The Thoughts of Dan Quayle; Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler's List; Safety Patrol; and Alive and Dead in Indiana. He has edited two collections of essays about the Midwest: A Place of Sense: Essays in Search of the Midwest and Townships: Pieces of the Midwest. His stories and essays have appeared in Harper's, Esquire, Story, Antaeus, North American Review, Benzene, Epoch, Denver Quarterly, Iowa Review, Third Coast, Shenandoah, Bomb, Story Quarterly, American Short Fiction and other magazines.

Martone was born and grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He attended Butler University and graduated from Indiana University. He holds the MA from The Writing Seminars of The Johns Hopkins University.

Martone has won two Fellowships from the NEA and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. His stories have won awards in the Italian Americana fiction contest, the Florida Review Short Story Contest, the Story magazine Short, Short Story Contest, the Margaret Jones Fiction Prize of Black Ice Magazine, and the first World's Best Short, Short Story Contest. His stories and essays have appeared and been cited in the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Stories and The Best American Essays anthologies. In 2013 he received the national Indiana Authors Award, and in 2016, the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contribution to Midwestern Literature.

Michael Martone is currently a Professor at the University of Alabama where he has been teaching since 1996. He has been a faculty member of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College since 1988. He has taught at Iowa State University, Harvard University, and Syracuse University.

Meg Pokrass is the author of a new flash fiction collection The Dog Seated Next to Me (Pelekinesis, 2020), 5 previous flash fiction collections including Alligators At Night (Ad Hoc Fiction – the Short-Short Story Press, 2018), Damn Sure Right (Press 53, 2011), a novella-in-flash (Rose Metal Press, 2014) and an award-winning collection of prose poetry, Cellulose Pajamas, which received the Bluelight Book Award in 2016. Her stories and poems have been internationally anthologized including Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton & Co., 2015), New Micro (W.W.Norton & Co, 2018), Best Small Fictions 2018 and 2019, (Braddock Avenue Books), and the Wigleaf Top Fifty numerous times. Her microfiction, flash fiction and poetry have been published in over 320 literary magazines, including Electric Literature and Tin House. Meg serves as an International flash fiction contest judge, most recently judging Mslexia Magazine’s Flash Fiction Contest, 2018 Bath Flash Award’s Novella-In-Flash Competition 2017 and 2018, and the Bath Flash Fiction Award. Meg serves as Founding Editor/Managing Editor of New Flash Fiction Review and where she founded the Anton Chekhov Prize for Very Short Fiction. She recently moved to England, where she teaches flash fiction workshops and serves as the Festival Curator for Flash Fiction Festival, U.K.

Gary Fincke: Author of the forthcoming The Out-of-Sorts: New and Selected Stories and Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the Ohio State University/The Journal Poetry Prize, Gary Fincke has published thirty-one books of poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction, most recently, Bringing Back the Bones: New and Selected Poems, A Room of Rain: Stories, and The Killer’s Dog: Stories. Within the past year he has won three national book prizes, one in each of the genres of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, including, most recently, The Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose offered by Pleiades Press.
An upcoming guest editor at SmokeLong Quarterly and frequent judge of national manuscript competitions, Gary’s stories have appeared in such periodicals as The Missouri Review, Newsday, The Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, and CrazyHorse. He has been twice awarded Pushcart Prizes for his work, recognized by Best American Stories and the O. Henry Prize series, and cited fifteen times in the past eighteen years for a "Notable Essay" in Best American Essays. He has just retired as the Charles Degenstein Professor of English and Creative Writing at Susquehanna University.