Rita Bullwinkel

Rita Bullwinkel is an American writer and editor who teaches creative writing at the University of San Francisco. She also edits McSweeney's Quarterly, a job she took on in 2024 after serving as an editor at large for the house since 2016, and she was earlier deputy editor of The Believer.

Her fiction likes odd angles and small, exact bodies of detail. Belly Up, her 2018 story collection, mixes ghosts, mediums and teenage girls who think they are plants with ordinary human mess. Headshot, her first novel, is set at a girls' boxing tournament in Reno, the 12th Annual Daughters of America Cup. Each chapter is a bout between two of the eight competitors, and the narration slips out of the ring to show who each girl was and who she will become.

Belly Up won the Believer Book Award. Bullwinkel received a Whiting Award in 2022. Headshot was longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize and was a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. In 2025 she received the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Yr Dead, the book that brought you here, is Sam Sax's novel, which follows a young queer Jewish person named Ezra. Bullwinkel's name is on it as editor, and it came out from McSweeney's in August 2024. To read her own writing, start with Headshot: it is short, fast and the clearest picture of what she does. If you prefer shorter fiction, pick up Belly Up next.