Please note that this event has passed. Please visit our Stars at Night page for information about this year’s event.
Each fall, the editors and staff of American Short Fiction host a grand celebration that recognizes literary excellence, extraordinary literary service, and a debut writer from Texas.
The Stars at Night is our favorite event of the year because it’s intimate, celebratory, community-fueled, and inspiring. It’s the most down-home, sophisticated literary spectacular on the map.
ASF’s sixth annual showcase will be a hybrid in-person and virtual event, taking place on November 11, 2021 at Mercury Hall. We are monitoring the Covid-19 situation locally and will adjust our plans as necessary to create the safest event possible. We are hopeful that this gathering will be an important moment to bring together award-winning authors, aspiring writers, avid readers, and literary supporters—and a reminder of why literature is vital in creating a better, more just, and more connected world.
UPDATE: ASF’s sixth annual showcase has been postponed until early Spring 2022 due to ongoing public health concerns in our area. We can’t wait to celebrate our thirtieth anniversary with you and cheer on our honorees together safely and in person next year. Please stay tuned here for more info in the coming weeks.
The Stars at Night 2021 Honorees
Yiyun Li is the author of six works of fiction—Must I Go, Where Reasons End, Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl—and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN/Hemingway Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize, and was featured in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 fiction issue. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Stacey Swann holds an M.F.A. from Texas State University and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her fiction has appeared in Epoch, Memorious, Versal, and other journals, and she is a contributing editor of American Short Fiction. Her debut novel, Olympus, Texas, was published in 2021 from Doubleday. She is a native Texan.
Danielle Evans is the author of the story collections The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, winner of the 2021 Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the PEN America PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Paterson Prize, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree. Her stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories. She teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
Meg Kuehn is the CEO of Kirkus Reviews, one of the industry’s most revered voices in book discovery. She began her career in publishing more than twenty years ago and earned early success, initially as a literary publicist, making her first national bestseller at the age of twenty-two, and then in strategic development, helping build Greenleaf Book Group into one of the fastest-growing companies in America. Brought on as Kirkus’ Vice President of Business Development in early 2011, Meg was named COO in 2012 and CEO in 2015.
All proceeds will support American Short Fiction, a nonprofit literary publisher of the best voices in contemporary short fiction. More information about tickets will be available soon.
A registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit arts organization, American Short Fiction relies on the generous support of individuals, foundations, and corporations to support and promote the literary arts in Texas and beyond. If you or your organization is interested in helping us further our mission of finding, publishing, and promoting today’s best writers and writing, you can download our sponsorship package here.
For more information about sponsorships, please contact us by email at amanda.faraone[at]americanshortfiction.org.