Contact: Taylor Schaefer
Stillhouse Press Media & Marketing
publicity@stillhousepress.org
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 9, 2025
SAD GROWNUPS NAMED WINNER OF 2025 PEN/BINGHAM PRIZE FOR DEBUT SHORT STORY COLLECTION
FAIRFAX, VA (May 2025)—The alumni, graduate and undergraduate George Mason University students at Stillhouse Press congratulate Amy Stuber and her debut collection, Sad Grownups, which was named winner of the PEN/BINGHAM Prize for Debut Short Story Collection at the 61st annual PEN America Literary Awards on May 8, 2025.
The PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection honors an exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut book, a collection of short stories, represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise for a second work of literary fiction. This year finalists and the prize winner, Sad Grownups, were selected by judges Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Leah Hampton, and Wendy Wimmer.
From the judges’ citation: “Sad Grownups is a collection full of surprises, both in its craft and content. Amy Stuber’s stories feel deeply familiar yet wholly unique, with mature, expansive explorations of womanhood, work and labor, the body, and the short story form itself, featuring characters who persist outside and beyond their narratives…aided by Stuber’s balance of humor with careful renderings of loss and struggle, and by the author’s ability to invite the reader into each story—sometimes literally—with conspiratorial precision and feisty, poignant social commentary. A remarkable debut, released with the very small and “gutsy” Stillhouse Press, Sad Grownups showcases Stuber’s potential and exceptional skill.”
About her win, Stuber said, “To debut thirty some years into a writing career is strange and happy-making…I’m so grateful to PEN, the judges, and truly to Stillhouse, a small, primarily student-run press, for taking a chance on my little book.”
GMU alumnus and Stillhouse editor-at-large Rebecca Burke, who acquired and edited Sad Grownups, said this collection “encapsulates modern Americana—the sweet, the ugly, the reality we face each day in this country. I am honored to have had the opportunity to work with Amy to bring this book to print.”
The winner of this prize also receives a $25,000 cash prize intended to allow significant time and resources with which to pursue subsequent work. Stuber intends to donate a portion of these winnings to Palestinian relief organizations.
Amy Stuber’s writing has appeared in the New England Review, Flash Fiction America, Ploughshares, The Idaho Review, Cincinnati Review, Triquarterly, American Short Fiction, Joyland, and elsewhere. She’s the recipient of the Missouri Review’s 2023 William Peden Prize in fiction, winner of the 2021 Northwest Review Fiction Prize, and runner-up for the 2022 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize. Her work received a special mention in Pushcart Prize XLIV, appeared on the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2021, has been nominated for Best of the Net, and appears in Best Small Fictions 2020 and 2023. Sad Grownups is her first book. https://www.amystuber.com/.
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STILLHOUSE PRESS is an independent book publisher based in Northern Virginia. We publish fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from writers both emerging and established, and are especially drawn to titles that transcend genre, take risks in form and content, and explore stylistic boundaries.
By way of our relationship with George Mason University’s MFA, MA, BFA, and BA programs, our aim is to provide educational opportunity for creative writers and aspiring publishing professionals through applied experience in the art of craft publishing—the act of soliciting, acquiring, producing, and marketing work from independent authors—in an effort to forge lasting connections and foster the growth of the greater literary community.
