Olivia Clare Friedman

Olivia Clare Friedman is a fiction writer, poet, and teacher. She is the author of four books — the novel Here Lies (Grove Atlantic), the short story collection Disasters in the First World (Black Cat/Grove Atlantic), and the poetry collections An Arm Fixed to a Wing (LSU Press) and The 26-Hour Day (New Issues). She serves as Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Her short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, The American Scholar, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of an O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. Her novel Here Lies was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and selected as a Women's National Book Association Great Read.

In poetry, Olivia is a recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Olive B. O'Connor Fellowship from Colgate University. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, Southern Review, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and Tin House. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the University of Southern California, and UC Berkeley, she received her PhD from the UNLV Black Mountain Institute.