Pamela Painter

Pamela Painter's first collection of stories, Getting to Know the Weather, won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and was reissued as A Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary in 2008. Her second collection of stories, also from Carnegie Mellon, is titled The Long and Short of It, published in 1999. Painter is co-author, with Anne Bernays, of the widely-used textbook What If? Fiction Exercises for Fiction Writers. Painter’s third story collection, Wouldn’t You Like to Know, was also published by Carnegie Mellon in 2010. Her fourth story collection, Ways to Spend the Night, was published by Engine Books in 2016. Painter's individual stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Five Points, Kenyon Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others, and in numerous anthologies, including Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction, Flash Fiction Forward, Microfiction, and New Micro.
The winner of three Pushcart Prizes and Agni's John Cheever Award for Fiction, Painter has received grants from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her stories have been produced by Stage Turner, by Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre, and by Word Theatre in Los Angeles, New York, and London. Additionally, her story titled "Reading in His Wake" was recorded for the CD Love Hurts, by W.W. Norton. Her newest collection is Fabrications: New and Selected Stories, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2020. Painter is a Founding Donor of the Flash Fiction Archive, established at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, in 2020.