Short fiction has been wildly popular at times in American literature and a chosen first form for emerging writers. In Speed Dating Round 2: Short Story Clinic, short story writers are paired up one-on-one with editors. Personal feedback, professional advice and criticism make this a valuable opportunity for writers to have a look into the publishing market for the short story.

To participate:

1) Send your short story (25-page limit, double-spaced) todesk@aaww.org. Include your name, contact information, and a short bio. Write “Speed Dating” on the subject line. Deadline to submit is Tuesday, October 17th.

2) If your story is chosen, the Workshop will forward it to the appropriate editor who will read your work in advance and be prepared to offer personal feedback. Payment is due upon acceptance.

3) Come on time to your assigned half-hour meeting and ask whatever you want. If you are unable to attend the event in person, but would like to participate, we will be accepting phone appointments also.

Featuring editors:

Stacey Barney (Kensington Books)
Lexy Bloom (Random House/Vintage/Anchor)
Larissa Dooley (Riverhead)
Kendra Harpster (Penguin/Viking)
Christopher Jackson (Random House/Spiegel and Grau)
Radhika Jones (The Paris Review)
Anne McPeak (The Hudson Review)
John Parsley (St. Martin’s Press/Thomas Dunne Books)
Jennifer Pooley (HarperCollins/William Morrow)
Anjali Singh (Houghton Mifflin)
Jill Schoolman (Archipelago Books)

$65 general, $50 members. Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis until filled. The Workshop will do the pairing. This event is open to individuals from all different levels of writing, ethnic backgrounds and literary interests.

Stacey Barney, an editor at Dafina/Kensington Books, has held posts in both adult and children’s book publishing, beginning her career at Lee & Low Books, a multicultural children’s book publisher. She then worked at Farrar, Straus and Giroux with such talented new writers as Chris Abani and Lisa Dierbeck. At Amistad/HarperCollins, she published LA Times Bestselling author Tamara T. Gregory’s Passport Diaries as well as acclaimed author Ronin Ro’s latest, Raising Hell: The Reign, Ruin, and Redemption of Run-D.M.C. and the bestselling This Voice In My Heart by Gilbert Tuhabonye. At Dafina/Kensington, Stacey is looking for Christian fiction, young adult, pop culture, and narrative nonfiction that speaks to the themes of education, race, class, gender and immigration — the outsider’s voice. She is also very interested in family stories, memoirs, women’s fiction, and international fiction. She will launch a young adult line for the Dafina list in the fall.

Lexy Bloom is an associate editor at Vintage/Anchor, part of the Knopf publishing group at Random House, where she works on both paperback reprints and original titles. She has worked with numerous authors in paperback, including Edwidge Danticat, James Salter, Mary Gaitskill, John Banville, Helen Oyeyemi, Thisbe Nissen, Richard McCann, and Tova Mirvis. She also works with Natsuo Kirino, Joshua Henkin, Danit Brown, Tod Wodicka, and Mia Kirshner, among others, whose original works are forthcoming from Knopf, Pantheon and Vintage/Anchor in 2007. Before coming to Vintage/Anchor, she was US Books Editor for Granta Books.

Larissa Dooley has worked with numerous award-winning and bestselling writers such as George Saunders, Steven Johnson, Erik Reece, John Hodgman, and Dan Crane in her position at Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group. Her book reviews and interviews have appeared in Boldtypeand Poets & Writers.

Kendra Harpster began her literary career at Doubleday in 1999 where she worked with writers such as Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead and Aimee Bender, published fiction by Shari Goldhagen (Family and Other Accidents), and Rod Liddle (Too Beautiful for You), and non-fiction by David Rakoff (Don’t Get Too Comfortable), and the Lance Armstrong Foundation (Live Strong). Now an editor at Viking, her list includes both literary and commercial fiction. Her upcoming titles for Viking/Penguin include Tana French’s In the Woods, Danielle Ganek’s Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him, Susan Vreeland’s Luncheon of the Boating Party and Kim Edwards’ short story collection, The Secrets of a Fire King.

Christopher Jackson is Executive Editor at Spiegel & Grau, a new division of the Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group at Random House, Inc. He has worked with numerous bestselling and award-winning authors, from Victor Lavalle and Edwidge Danticat to David Corn and Jack Weatherford. His authors at Spiegel & Grau include Warren St. John, Matt Taibbi, Ta-Nehesi Coates, and Adam Mansbach.

Radhika Jones is the managing editor of The Paris Review, and her interview with Peter Carey appeared in the magazine’s summer issue. She is a frequent contributor toBookforum and the author of introductions to Barnes & Noble Classics editions of Great Expectations, David Copperfield, and A Room with a View.

Anne McPeak is the associate editor of The Hudson Review. She received a B.A. in literature from Bard College, with a concentration in writing. Previous to joining the magazine, she was an assistant at the Irene Skolnick Literary Agency. Her fiction and book reviews have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail.

John Parsley is an Editor at Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, where he acquires and edits literary and commercial fiction and narrative nonfiction. He is also the founding editor of LOST Magazine, a monthly online magazine that features fiction and nonfiction and has published writers including Tom Bissell, Wayne Curtis, Marilyn Johnson, Peter Orner, Mary Roach, Floyd Skloot, and Robert Sullivan.

Jennifer Pooley is an editor at William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, where she began her career in 1998. She loves discovering strong new voices in literary and commercial fiction and has acquired such debut novels as K. L. Cook’s The Girl From Charnelle, Catherine Hanrahan’sLost Girls and Love Hotels, and Willy Vlautin’s The Motel Life. Her nonfiction acquisition interests are eclectic and include serious narrative nonfiction, humor, history, science, and memoir that deliver an unforgettable armchair experience, such as Marjorie Hart’s Summer At Tiffany (forthcoming) and Alison and Melissa Houtte’s Alligators, Old Mink and New Money, and the occasional whimsical gift title with a pop culture slant, such as Amy Allen’s This Little Piggy Went to Prada: Nursery Rhymes for the Blahnik Brigade (forthcoming) and David C. Barnette’s The Offical Guide to Christmas in the South: Or, If You Can’t Fry It, Spraypaint It Gold. She publishes the work of such authors as John Barlow, Christoper Bram, Maud Casey, Emily Franklin, Lolita Files, Lisa Jewell, Ami McKay, and Leslie Pietrzyk, among others.

Anjali Singh began her career in publishing in 1996, when she landed a job as a scout of American and Canadian books for foreign publishers. Before joining Houghton Mifflin in 2006, she worked as an editor at Vintage and Pantheon Books, where she sought out American and international writers of literary fiction, travel, memoir, and narrative journalism. Her authors included Nuha al-Radi, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Diana Abu-Jaber, Nadeem Aslam and Valerie Martin. While there, she also carved out a niche publishing graphic novels, among them Marjane Satrapi’s memoirs of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution,Persepolis and Persepolis 2 (which she also translated from the French), David B.’s Epileptic, Joann Sfar’s The Rabbi’s Cat and Jessica Abel’s La Perdida.

Jill Schoolman founded Archipelago Books in 2003 after working with Seven Stories Press for four years in the editorial department. She graduated from Yale University with a BA in Literature in ’92, and studied English literature at Oxford University in ’89-’90. She worked as an assistant film editor before she entered the publishing world. (She also delivered pizzas on mopeds in Paris for several months.) She was selected to participate in the French-American Foundation-sponsored editors’ exchange program in ’99 as well as the German Book Office-sponsored editors’ trip to Germany in ’03. Archipelago Books is a non-profit press devoted to classic and contemporary international literature.