Laura Furman (born 1945) is an American author whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Mirabella, Ploughshares,[1] Southwest Review, Yale Review, and elsewhere.

Laura Furman
BornLaura Furman
1945 (age 78–79)
New York City, U.S.
Occupation
Alma materBennington College
SpouseJoel Warren Barna
Children1

Biography

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Furman was born in New York City and attended Hunter College High School and Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. In 1978, she moved to Houston, Texas. After living in Houston, Galveston, Dallas, and Lockhart she settled in Austin with her husband, Joel Warren Barna, and their son. She now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

She has written four collections of stories The Glass House, Watch Time Fly, Drinking with the Cook, The Mother Who Stayed, two novels The Shadow Line and Tuxedo Park, and a memoir Ordinary Paradise.

From 2002 - 2019, she was the series editor of The O. Henry Prize Stories, an annual collection published by Anchor Books. Furman selected the twenty winning stories.

She taught for twenty-eight years at the University of Texas at Austin, where she was Susan Taylor McDaniel Regents Professor of Creative Writing. While at UT, she founded the literary magazine American Short Fiction, which was a finalist for the National Magazine Award.

Awards

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  • New York State Council on the Arts Fellowship
  • 1982 Guggenheim Fellowship[2]
  • Dobie-Paisano Fellowship
  • National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship
  • Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award
  • Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship
  • Yaddo Residencies

Selected bibliography

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Books

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  • Drinking with the Cook (story collection)
  • Ordinary Paradise (memoir)
  • Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading (edited with Elinore Standard)
  • Tuxedo Park (novel)
  • Watch Time Fly (story collection)
  • The Shadow Line (novel)
  • The Glass House (story collection and novella)
  • The Mother Who Stayed: Stories (story collection and novella)

Short stories

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Editor

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  • Series Editor, The O.Henry Prize Stories, 2003—2019
  • Co-editor, with Elinore Standard, Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading, 1997

References

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  1. ^ "Read by Author | Ploughshares".
  2. ^ "Laura J. Furman - John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation". Archived from the original on 2011-06-03. Retrieved 2010-01-11.
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