
Jonathan Escoffery is the author of the linked story collection, If I Survive You, a New York Times and Booklist Editor’s Choice, an IndieNext Pick, and an International Bestseller. If I Survive You was longlisted for the National Book Award, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize For Debut Short Story Collection, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the Story Prize, and was shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Southern Book Prize, and the California Bookseller Alliance’s Golden Poppy Award. It was named a ‘best’ or ‘most anticipated’ book of 2022 by The New Yorker, The New York Times, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, People, Oprah Daily, GQ, Good Morning America online, Apple Books, Goodreads, Booklist, Vox, BuzzFeed, Vulture, L.A. Times, Shondaland, TIME, The Root, Vanity Fair, Kirkus, The Millions, BET, O Quarterly Magazine, Real Simple, and elsewhere.
In North America, If I Survive You is published by MCDxFSG (U.S.) and McClelland and Stewart (Canada). It is published in the UK and Commonwealth by 4th Estate Books, and is published in translation in Germany by Piper Verlag, and will be published in translation in France by Albin Michel (May, 2024), and in Spain by Alianza.
Jonathan is the winner of The Paris Review’s 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction and is the recipient of a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts (Prose) Literature Fellowship. His story “Under the Ackee Tree” was among the trio that won the Paris Review the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction from the American Society of Magazine Editors, and was subsequently included in The Best American Magazine Writing 2020. His stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Oprah Daily, Electric Literature, Zyzzyva, AGNI, Pleiades, American Short Fiction, Prairie Schooner, Passages North, and elsewhere.
Jonathan has taught creative writing and seminars on the writer’s life at Stanford University, the University of Minnesota, the Center for Fiction, Tin House, The Work Room, The Porch, and at GrubStreet in Boston, where, as former staff, he founded the Boston Writers of Color Group, which currently has more than 2,000 members. He has received support and honors from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, Aspen Words, Kimbilio Fiction, the Anderson Center, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s Creative Writing MFA Program (Fiction) and attends the University of Southern California’s Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature Program as a Provost Fellow. He is a 2021-2023 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
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