Laura Furman

Laura J. Furman (born 1945) is an American author best known for her role as series editor for the O. Henry Awards prize story collection. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Mirabella, Ploughshares,^[1] Southwest Review.

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

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

She taught 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 three-time finalist for the National Magazine Award.

Furman’s most recent book of fiction, The Mother Who Stayed: Stories, was published in February 2011

Awards

• 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
• 2013 Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship

Selected bibliography

Books

• 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

Short stories

• "Sunny" The New Yorker 60/50 (28 January 1985): 29-34

Editor

• Series Editor, The O.Henry Prize Stories, 2003—
• O. Henry Awards

References

External links

• Faculty page at the University of Texas at Austin
• Page at O. Henry Prize Stories website
• Article about Furman at The Austin Chronicle