Drue Heinz Winner Kate Wisel

Featured Authors:

Kate Wisel is a native of Boston. Her fiction has appeared in publications that include Gulf Coast, Tin House online, New Delta Review, The Best Small Fictions 2019, Redivider (as winner of the Beacon Street Prize), and elsewhere. She was a Carol Houck fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and awarded scholarships at Writing x Writers, the Wesleyan Writer’s Conference, the Squaw Valley Writer’s Workshop, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago.

Irina Reyn is the author of What Happened to Anna K, The Imperial Wife, and most recently, Mother Country. She is also the editor of the anthology Living on the Edge of the World: New Jersey Writers Take on the Garden State. She has reviewed books for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The Forward, and other publications. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in One Story, Tin House, Ploughshares, Town & Country Travel and Poets & Writers. She teaches fiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh. Born in Moscow, she lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Brooklyn, NY.

The Drue Heinz Literature Prize was established in 1980 to encourage and support the writing and reading of short fiction. The first award was presented in 1981 to David Bosworth for The Death of Descartes, selected by Robert Penn Warren. Over the past nearly four decades, some of the most accomplished writers in the English language have served as senior judges, including Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Alice McDermott, John Edgar Wideman, Elizabeth Hardwick, Michael Chabon, Joan Didion, Scott Turow, Ann Patchett, and Richard Russo. They have selected the best collections from the hundreds of manuscripts submitted annually to receive a cash prize of $15,000 and publication by the University of Pittsburgh Press.  

The prize was endowed by the Drue Heinz Trust in 1995 to provide funds for the prize in perpetuity.  As one journalist wrote at the time, if the short story and novella are “stepchildren” in the world of literature, “then the Drue Heinz Literature Prize is a fairy godmother.”