Robert and Adele Schiff Fiction Festival Panel Discussion

“Alumni Confidential: A Conversation about Publishing, Literary Careers, and Life After a Graduate Writing Degree,” featuring Gwen E. Kirby, Brenda Peynado, Liv Stratman, and Bess Winter. Part of the Robert and Adele Schiff Fiction Festival at UC. In-person in Tangeman University Center, Room 400B and also via Zoom. For more information visit www.artsci.uc.edu/creativewriting

Gwen E. Kirby is the author of the debut collection Shit Cassandra Saw. She has an MFA from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati. Her stories appear in One Story, Tin House, Guernica, Mississippi Review, Ninth Letter, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Currently, she is the associate director of programs and finance for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference at the University of the South, where she also teaches creative writing.

Brenda Peynado's genre-bending short story collection, The Rock Eaters—featuring alien arrivals, angels falling from rooftops, virtual reality, and sorrows manifesting as tumorous stones—garnered starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, and was named one of NPR, the New York Public Library, and Electric Literature's best books of the year. Her stories have won an O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award, and inclusion in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and over forty other short stories have appeared in places such as Tor.com, The Georgia Review, The Sun, The Southern Review, and Epoch. She teaches creative writing at the University of Houston.

Liv Stratman holds a BA and MA from the University of Cincinnati, and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her first novel, Cheat Day, was released by Scribner in 2021. She lives in Long Island, New York.

Bess Winter has written on the topics of: dolls, mummies, taxidermy, death, horse tails, stolen eggs, Victorians, primates, private school girls, daguerreotypes, gas leaks, etc. Her work appears in Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Ecotone, W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction International, and elsewhere, and has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and the American Short[er] Fiction Prize. She’s received fellowships and scholarships from the Corporation of Yaddo, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She grew up in Toronto, Canada. She has taught creative writing to kids, teens, and adults at StoryStudio Chicago, WordPlay Cincinnati, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, Machines of Another Era, was released by Gold Wake Press in 2021.

Host or Publisher University of Cincinnati English Department