Jonathan Escoffery is the author of the critically acclaimed debut story collection If I Survive You (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a finalist for the 2023 Booker Prize. His next book is the forthcoming novel Play Stone Kill Bird. Escoffery 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. Escoffery has taught creative writing and seminars on the writer’s life at Stanford University, the University of Minnesota, the Center for Fiction, and Tin House, among others. 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.