Pamela Painter

PAMELA PAINTER is the author of four story collections, Getting to Know the Weather, which won the Great Lakes College Award Award for First Fiction, The Long and Short of It, Wouldn’t You Like to Know and Ways to Spend the Night. She is also the co-author with Anne Bernays of the widely-used textbook, What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers.

Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Five Points, Harper’s, Kenyon Review, Matter Press, New Flash Fiction Review, Ploughshares and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others and in numerous anthologies, such as Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction, From Blues to Bop: A Collection of Jazz Fiction, Four Minute Fictions, Flash Fiction Forward, MicroFiction, Nothing Short of 100, Love Stories for Our Time, and New Micro.

She has received grants from The Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts, has won three Pushcart Prizes and Agni Review’s John Cheever Award for Fiction.

Painter’s stories have been presented on National Public Radio, and on stage by Stage Turner, Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre, and in Los Angeles, New York City and London by Cedering Fox’s Word Theatre Company. Her stories also appear on well-known artist Anthony Russo’s YouTube channel CRONOGO.

Beginning in the late 80s, Painter was perhaps the first writer to teach workshops entirely devoted to the short short story at Emerson College in Boston. Many of her students have published stories, won flash fiction awards and become publishers themselves of flash fiction—two examples are Rose Metal Press and Quick Fiction.

Painter’s new collection of stories, Fabrications: New and Selected Stories, is due out from Johns Hopkins University Press, November, 2020.