08/26/2025
✨More past winners of the Iowa Short Fiction Awards ✨
2019: HAPPY LIKE THIS by Ashley Wurzbacher. In the midst of their ambivalence about marriage, monogamy, and motherhood and their struggles to accept and love their bodies, the women in these stories look to each other for solidarity. Sometimes they find it; sometimes they don’t. Spanning a wide range of voices, styles, and settings, HAPPY LIKE THIS offers deeply felt, often humorous meditations on the complexity of choice and the ambiguity of happiness.
2020: FATHER GUARDS THE SHEEP by Sari Rosenblatt. A substitute teacher encounters mouthy students who believe she’s not real. Another lands a job on her city’s arson squad. Rosenblatt’s comic sensibility entertains and consoles, while seeming to say to her readers: you might as well laugh.
2020: ANCESTRY by Eileen O’Leary. How does one live a good life? If you’re Pat Graves, you change your name to Cecile Collette, move to Cleveland, and join three churches and the Rotary Club. College freshman Adam holds a fantasy of his newly discovered father, only to find the man broke and foolish. A grandmother draws parallels between a past fling with politician who’s now spouting foreign policy on CNN. Whether set in Scandinavia, America, France, Australia, or Nepal, these stories champion those who are tenacious in the face of life’s surprises.
2022: STORIES NO ONE HOPES ARE ABOUT THEM by A.J. Bermudez. An exploration of convergences of power, privilege, and place. Characters who are ni de aquí, ni de allá—neither from here nor there—straddle competing worlds, disrupt paradigms, and transition from objects of other people’s stories to active subjects and protagonists of their own.
YOURS COULD BE NEXT:)
