Gina Frangello, novelist, editor, and faculty member at both Columbia College Chicago and Northwestern University, has agreed to serve as the final judge for the 2012 Nick Adams Short Story Contest.
Open to any student at an ACM college, the Nick Adams Contest celebrates the creative impulse of ACM students. A $1,000 cash prize is awarded to the winner, which is chosen by the final judge from among a group of finalist stories. The contest, named for the young hero of many of Ernest Hemingway’s stories, was started in 1973 with funds from an anonymous donor.
Frangello’s books include A Life in Men (forthcoming in 2013) and My Sister’s Continent (2006). Slut Lullabies, her short story collection, was published in 2010. She guest-edited the anthology Falling Backwards: Stories of Fathers and Daughters (2004), and her short fiction has appeared in many publications, including StoryQuarterly, Swink, Clackamas Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Fence, MAKE magazine, and the Chicago Reader.
Gina Frangello
In addition to writing, Frangello has been a longtime editor of the literary magazine Other Voices and is the fiction editor of the online literary collective The Nervous Breakdown and is the Sunday Editor at The Rumpus. She also co-founded Other Voices Books in 2005.
Donna Seaman praises My Sister’s Continent in Booklist and notes that Frangello’s debut novel portrays “high-strung characters” who “struggle to decode the mysteries of the self while their bodies express what their minds repress. Frangello … delves fearlessly into questions of identity, abuse, power, trust, trespass, and delusion.”
Stephen Elliott wrote that “Slut Lullabies is beautiful, daring, triumphant. [Frangello’s] writing is fearless and original and kind and there simply aren’t enough books like this.”
Slut Lullabies are “savvy, sexy, blunt stories that keep inviting a reader in,” according to Aimee Bender.
Frangello is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Individual Fellowship for Prose, an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award, and the 2010 Summer Literary Seminars fiction contest. She teaches writing in Columbia College Chicago’s Fiction Writing Department and Northwestern University’s School of Continuing Studies.
A psychology major at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Frangello earned a Master’s degree in counseling and soon realized she needed to write full-time. She later received a graduate degree from the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois-Chicago. She lives in her hometown of Chicago with her husband and three children.
In serving as the final judge for the Nick Adams Contest, Frangello joins an illustrious group of writers, including Anne Tyler, Saul Bellow, Joyce Carol Oates, Maya Angelou, John Updike, and, most recently, Binnie Kirshenbaum (2011), Alex Kotlowitz (2010), and Audrey Niffenegger (2009).
Links:
Nick Adams Short Story Contest
Gina Frangello’s website: www.ginafrangello.com
