Jamie Quatro

Jamie Quatro was born in San Diego, California, and raised in Tucson, Arizona, the daughter of a physician father and classical pianist mother. Quatro was also trained as a classical pianist, but quit taking lessons when her studies reached the university level. At the age of 20, she received her BA in English from Pepperdine University, and two years later completed her MA in English at the College of William and Mary, specializing in postcolonial literature and theory. She was then awarded a Presidential Fellowship from Princeton University, where she began doctoral studies in British Romantic Poetry. She left the program after learning she and her husband were pregnant with the first of their four children.

Quatro received her MFA in Fiction from the Bennington College Writing Seminars in 2009. Since then, her stories and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Tin House, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s, Oxford American, AGNI, and elsewhere. A finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and winner of the 2011 American Short Fiction contest, she is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf, and Sewanee. Her story “Sinkhole” received an O.Henry award, and will be included in the 2013 O.Henry Prize Stories anthology. Her fiction has also been anthologized in Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial and is forthcoming in the new edition of Ann Charters’ The Story and Its Writer (Bedford/St. Martin’s).