Megan Giddings
Megan Giddings’s debut novel, Lakewood, published by Amistad in March 2020, was an NPR Best Book of 2020 and one of New York Magazine’s 10 Best Books of 2020. Additionally, it was a Michigan Notable Book for 2021, a nominee for two NAACP Image Awards, and a finalist for the LA Times Ray Bradbury Book Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction in 2021. In 2018, she was a recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial fund grant for feminist fiction. From 2013-2014, Giddings was a Kathy Fish Fellow and Writer-in-Residence at Smokelong Quarterly. She was the editor for Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction: An Anthology of Flash Fiction by Writers of Color, which was published in March 2019. She is the author of two chapbooks, Arcade Seventeen and The Most Dangerous Game and The Romances. Her next work, The Women Could Fly, is set to be released on August 9, 2022, and explores the limits women face and the powers they have to transgress and transcend them.
Her short stories have been published in Catapult, The Iowa Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Literary Review, The Masters Review, Wigleaf, Oxford Magazine, The Lonely Stories, The Southeast Review, and numerous others. Her short story, “Brittle” was a distinguished story in Best American Short Stories 2018, and “A Husband Should Be Eaten and Not Heard” was included in the 2018 Best of the Net anthology. “Afterschool Special” was named an Honorable Mention in The Cincinnati Review’s Rober and Adele Schiff Prizes in Poetry and Prose in 2013.
In 2020 she appeared in an interview with Story to discuss her writing origins, inspirations, and processes. Giddings shared, “I guess the older I get — and I’m not even that old yet — but I guess the more time that I’m an adult, the more I see that things aren’t rigid. Things are rarely as we see them in the moment. They’re usually much more complex, and there’s usually a root to it. The only thing that sometimes brings honesty or truth is time. In some ways, it’s very pleasurable to realize that time is the only thing that will give you the distance and ability to understand something. Yet, I’m still deeply impatient, and I just want to know everything all the time. I don’t think this is just true to my work. This is at the heart of what a lot of contemporary writing is getting to. I’m more likely to question any writing now that can write with absolute certainty about an event. I guess the pleasure of a third-person point of view might be that someone can give you certainty. They can tell you what’s going on. But more and more, I think that’s a lie… Especially right now, though, I feel like I don’t know anything. No one ever knows everything.”
Giddings attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI, for her B.A. in Creative Writing and Literature. She went on to Indiana University in Bloomington, IN, for her M.F.A. in Fiction. She worked as visiting faculty at Antioch University Los Angeles, and as an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota and Michigan State University.
Giddings lives in Bloomington, Indiana. She is a Senior Features Editor at The Rumpus and the Fiction Editor at The Offing.
Updated June 2022