STELLA KUPFERBERG MEMORIAL SHORT STORY PRIZE

The Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize is awarded annually by Selected Shorts and a guest author judge. This year, Carmen Maria Machado selected Esther Hayes' story “What I Could Have Given” as the 2024 winner. Please enjoy Colby Minifie's performance of this story.

The story is also available to read on Electric Literature:

Esther Hayes is a writer from Nevada whose work has appeared in Guernica Magazine, The Threepenny Review, and Puerto del Sol. She received her MFA from Colorado State University, where she was an associate editor at Colorado Review. She served as the Olive B. O’Connor Fiction Fellow at Colgate University and has been granted fellowships from the Community of Writers and the Ucross Foundation. She is currently working on a collection of short stories and a novel.

Colby Minifie recently starred on the television series The Boys, Fear the Walking Dead, and Gen V. She has appeared on Broadway in The Pillowman, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and Six Degrees Of Separation; Off-Broadway in Epiphany, Punk Rock, Close Up Space, Landscape of the Body, and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. Her film and television credits include Law & Order, Glee, Nurse Jackie, The Blacklist, The Michael J. Fox Show, Black Box, Deep Powder, Camilla Dickinson, The Greatest, The Winning Season, Don’t Think Twice, Paterno, Submission, The Super, An Actor Prepares, Radium Girls, Madam Secretary, Dietland, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Marvel’s Jessica Jones, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, and Homebody. She can currently be seen on the series Gen V. Minifie is thrilled to continue to work with Selected Shorts.

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the National Book Award finalist short story collection Her Body and Other Parties; the bestselling memoir In the Dream House; and the limited-run comic series The Low, Low Woods. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, The Believer, McSweeney’s, Guernica, and elsewhere.