Karin Lin-Greenberg
Karin Lin-Greenberg’s first story collection, Faulty Predictions, won the Flannery O’Connor Award in Short Fiction from the University of Georgia Press and won gold in the Short Story category of Foreword Reviews‘ INDIE Book of the Year. Her second story collection, Vanished, won the 2021 Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Fiction and will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in September 2022. Her next work, You Are Here, her debut novel, is forthcoming from Counterpoint in 2023.
In an interview with Gady Dancer, Lin-Greenberg shares how she put together her story collection, Faulty Predictions, and how she determined the settings of her stories. She divulged: “The settings are all places where I’ve lived or imagined towns that are similar to places I’ve lived. I’ve moved a lot in the last decade, and I wanted to incorporate each place I lived in my fiction. Some sense of setting is always important for me. I tell my students that we need to know a general sense of where things are taking place; if we don’t know, we often get scenes where characters are talking to each other, and readers can’t picture where the characters are.”
Her story “Housekeeping” received a Pushcart Prize and was listed as a Distinguished Story of 2020 in Best American Short Stories 2021. She was a finalist for the Chicago Tribune‘s 2018 Nelson Algren Award. Lin-Greenberg has been awarded fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Wesleyan Writers Conference, the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the Longleaf Writers Conference, and MacDowell. Her stories have recently appeared in Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Shenandoah, the Chicago Tribune, The Antioch Review, Boulevard, Crazyhorse, Epoch, The Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and more.
Lin-Greenberg’s submission “So Much Trouble” won Character in the 2018 CRAFT Elements Contest. CRAFT wrote: “Karin Lin-Greenberg’s “So Much Trouble” is a complex and sensitive grief narrative disguised as a simple yet beautiful story, with levels of tension, plenty of humor, and well-drawn, memorable characters… This balanced piece opens strong in scene and voice, then handles time effectively, with seamless transitions in and out of backstory. Setting, dialogue, theme, narrative arc—each of the craft elements we seek when evaluating a story—are used here skillfully, without revealing the writer at work.”
She has taught creative writing at Missouri State University, the College of Wooster, and Appalachian State University. She earned her B.A. in English from Bryn Mawr College, an M.F.A. in fiction writing from the University of Pittsburgh in 2006, and an MA in literature and writing from Temple University in 2003.
Currently, Lin-Greenberg lives in upstate New York and is an associate professor in the English Department at Siena College. She also teaches in Carlow University’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program. Topics her courses have covered include traditional and experimental fiction, flash fiction, the novella, the story cycle, memoir, graphic memoirs, the lyric essay, and the nature essay.
Updated June 2022