Coolest American Stories 2023

MARK WISH has seen more than 125 of his short stories published in print venues such as The Best American Short Stories, The Georgia Review, TriQuarterly, American Short Fiction, The Antioch Review, Crazy-horse, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, The Sun, The Missouri Review, Paris Transcontinental, and Fiction International. His short stories have also won a Tobias Wolff Award, a Kay Cattarulla Award, an Isherwood Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize. Mark served as the fiction editor of California Quarterly, was the founding fiction editor of New York Stories and a contributing editor for Pushcart, and has long been known as the freelance editor who has revised the fiction of many once-struggling writers, leading to its publication in dozens of respected venues, including The Atlantic, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Antioch Review, The Hudson Review, and The Best American Short Stories. His third novel, Watch Me Go, was praised by Daniel Woodrell and Rebecca Makkai and published by Putnam. His fourth novel, Necessary Deeds, will be published by Regal House in 2024.

ELIZABETH COFFEY is an award-winning design director at Random House, where she has designed book interiors for Barack Obama’s A Promised Land, Michelle Obama’s Becoming and The Light We Carry, Glennon Doyle’s Untamed, and numerous other bestselling titles. She dabbled in poetry in the nineties and published in several small magazines. She is working on her first novel, a mystery about estranged sisters. Her pen name is a tribute to her beloved great-grandmother Johanna Coffey. Elizabeth has been Mark’s go-to editor for virtually all of his published short stories and Watch Me Go.