NER is proud to congratulate Celeste Mohammed on being awarded the 2018 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers! Along with other award-winners, she’ll be reading at the book launch in NYC on September 24, 7 pm, at Housing Works Bookstore.

Her story, “Six Months” from NER 38.1, will be published in the anthology PEN American Best Debut Short Stories 2018, on sale August 21.

This year marks the second annual PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Among nearly 70 submissions of works written by previously unpublished writers, 12 were selected for the prize by a panel of three judges which included Jodi Angel, Lesley Nneka Arimah, and Alexandra Kleeman.

“Six Months” follows the misadventures of Luther Archibald Junior after his move from the Caribbean island of Trinidad to New York City in the 1980s and the moral conundrum in which he soon finds himself.

Other stories in the collection include the tale of a man assigned to be the social worker for a recently reanimated father who had been dead for 16 years; a camping trip and a marriage gone tragically wrong; and a housewife in Taipei who longs for a life beyond the passionless one she inhabits. Congratulations to all the emerging writers collected here!

Carolyn Kuebler’s interview with Mohammed can be found here.