Oregon Book Awards Fiction Finalists Reading

Miriam Gershow is the author of Closer, Survival Tips: Stories and The Local News. Her writing is featured in The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, and Black Warrior Review, among other journals. She is the recipient of a Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Oregon Literary Fellowship, and is a two-time finalist for the Oregon Book Award.

Victor Lodato is a playwright and the author of the novel Mathilda Savitch, winner of the PEN Center USA Award for fiction, Edgar and Lucy and Honey. His stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, and Best American Short Stories. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Victor was born and raised in New Jersey and currently divides his time between Ashland, Oregon, and Tucson, Arizona.

National Book Award-nominee Kimberly King Parsons is the bestselling author of We Were the Universe, a Dakota Johnson Book Club pick ranked #2 on TIME Magazine's Best Books of 2024. The New York Times praised this debut novel as "a profound, gutsy tale of grief's dismantling power" and it was a best book of 2024 in Elle, Oprah Daily, Marie Claire, Marie Claire UK and many others. Parsons’s debut collection, Black Light, was a finalist for the Edmund White Award for Fiction, the Story Prize, and the Texas Institute of Letters Fiction Award. An Oregon Book Award-winner, Parsons teaches fiction at Pacific University and lives in Portland with her family.

Charlie J. Stephens was born and raised in Salem, Oregon. Their debut novel, A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest, (2024) was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and was awarded the Leslie Feinberg Award in Trans and Gender-Variant Literature and the Foreword Indies Bronze Award in LGBTQ+ Adult Fiction. Their new collection of short stories, Annihilation for Beginners, will be published by Buckman in early 2026. More at www.charliejstephenswriting.com