We're so pleased to introduce Katie Field, our new outreach coordinator & associate editor, who will be helping us grow our community and expand our public events programming in Austin. Katie first entered our orbit during our Summer Workshop in 2023, and we've been lucky to have them as part of the magazine's family ever since—reading submissions with gusto, selling more ASF T-shirts than anyone thought possible at AWP, and generally bringing their sunny, kind, and gentle energy into every … [Read more...] about Introducing Our New Outreach Coordinator Katie Field
Editors’ Note
“How should I live my life?” the Pulitzer-winning poet Marie Howe asks in one of her better-known poems. In the final lines of this spring issue, Howe is invoked by Manuel Gonzales, via another poem, in a kind of literary call to arms: an uprising against writer’s block, but more broadly a proclamation that language—artistic expression—can change and renew a life in a way that ultimately defines it as human and worth something. [ . . . ] ———— Digital subscriptions to American Short Fiction … [Read more...] about Editors’ Note
Portrait of Sara in Winter
When Lyle Arnolds is seven, his parents drive to pick up Sara, who is eight—they are going to the state fair in Des Moines, Iowa. It is summer, and the sun hurts. The month has been full of storms. Lyle doesn’t know this will be his last anchored memory of Sara Morales as a young child. A year later, she will move to Kansas. Other memories float: he and Sara chase shadows along the Iowa River, unless it is Lake MacBride; it is March or it is April. That afternoon at the fair is certain. It is … [Read more...] about Portrait of Sara in Winter
Nine’s Lives
She’d been an ungainly, ostracized ten-year-old, but by her early thirties, Nine had ripened into a chiseled, radical artist. Then the pandemic hit and she reverted to the mean. This was how she felt at forty-two in Oakland, California. Even her facial features seemed fatter and flatter, as though a truck convoy had passed over her while she lay on her back staring at the moon. Nine had enrolled in her first sculpture class in college. Her name had been Nora then, back when she’d read … [Read more...] about Nine’s Lives
My History of Food
Tomorrow is our birthday. We spend the evening on my brother’s phone, reminding our parents about our earlier birthdays. They WeChat us from their apartment in Beijing, a light-filled structure of imitation marble, with a housemaid clattering about in their kitchen. Tell your mother about the first one, our father says. The first one after we moved to the States, we assume—oh College Station and your grasshoppers and Cracker Barrels and inflatable pools sagging on your front lawns. “Tell her … [Read more...] about My History of Food
Blizzard
Some lady had tried to bring a live chicken on the bus, which caused a bit of a stir. The snow pelted down and we felt badly for her. She was all alone, without husband or child to help. Already her dark silhouette was dotted white. If no one came to her aid, the snow threatened to disappear her entirely. In the folds of her coat, the chicken flapped madly, scattering snow, unable to wrest free of her woolen arm. It was a little crazy. The bus driver must’ve thought so too, because he had left … [Read more...] about Blizzard