Amy Stuber

Amy Stuber is a fiction writer who published stories in literary magazines for years before she had a book. Her work has appeared in New England Review, Ploughshares, The Common, Witness and Joyland. She has a PhD in English, taught college writing for about a decade, and edits flash fiction for Split Lip Magazine, where she is now a contributing editor.

Her subject is the American adult at a turning point. Interviewers describe characters who pile up new jobs, relationships and identities while trying to shake off old disappointments. Recurring concerns include adolescence, atonement and motherhood. She likes to play with form: she will bend a timeline, swap protagonists or take apart her own plot while the story is still running. The humor is dry and sits right beside loss.

Sad Grownups, seventeen stories, came out in October 2024 from Stillhouse Press, the teaching press of George Mason University. It won the 2025 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, announced on May 8, 2025, at the PEN America Literary Awards. The judges were Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Leah Hampton and Wendy Wimmer. Earlier honors include the Missouri Review's William Peden Prize for her story The Last Summer and the 2021 Northwest Review Fiction Prize.

Sad Grownups is her only book so far, so begin there. The title story, which gave the collection its name, is a sensible first stop, and because the book is made of separate stories you can move through it at your own pace. If you want a taste first, Edward Abbey Walks Into A Bar is free to read at Joyland.