Called “extremely funny and mordant” by author Sherman Alexie, Xhenet Aliu’s debut fiction collection, Domesticated Wild Things, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction. Her novel, Brass, is forthcoming from Random House in January 2018.
Aliu’s short fiction and essays have appeared in journals such as Glimmer Train, Hobart, The Barcelona Review, Necessary Fiction, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere, and she has received multiple scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a grant from The Elizabeth George Foundation, and a fellowship from the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, among other awards. She holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and an MLIS from the University of Alabama, where she was an ALFA fellow, studying methods of delivering information services to individuals with disabilities. A native of Waterbury, Connecticut, whose brass industry attracted large waves of Eastern European immigrants before the demise of the factories in the 1970s and ’80s, she was born to an Albanian father and a Lithuanian American mother. She now lives in Athens, Georgia, and works as an academic librarian.
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