Grubbies

About Jonathan

Jonathan Escoffery is the author of If I Survive You, a New York Times and Booklist Editor’s Choice, an IndieNext Pick, and an International Bestseller. If I Survive You was nominated for more than a dozen prizes and awards internationally, including the National Book Award, the Dublin Literary Award, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the Story Prize, and was a finalist for the Booker Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and the Southern Book Prize. If I Survive You received American Short Fiction‘s 2023 Constellation Award for a Story Collection and was named Miami New Times’ 2023 Best Book by a Local Author. It was named a ‘best’ book of 2022 by NPR, The New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, People, TIME, Oprah Daily, L.A. Times, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Vox, Kirkus, BookPage, Real Simple, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. In 2023, Jonathan was named among the 36 Forces Shaping the Cultural Conversation by Harper’s Bazaar. He was a 2021-2023 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and won The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for Fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2020. 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. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Observer, The Paris Review, Oprah Daily, Electric Literature, Zyzzyva, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. Jonathan has taught creative writing and seminars on the writer’s life at Stanford University, the University of Minnesota, Randolph College, the Center for Fiction, Tin House, The Work Room, The Porch, and at GrubStreet in Boston, where, as former staff, he founded the Boston Writers of Color Group, which currently has more than 2,000 members. 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 was a 2021-2023 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.