“When I was about ten, my father asked if I wanted to learn his cow insemination trade or become a nun. My mother didn’t think I was nun material…so what choice did that leave me but to move to San Francisco and become a writer?”
Nona Caspers' new book The Fifth Woman, a Novel in Stories (Sarabande Books, 2018), was selected by Stacy D’erasmo for the Mary McCarthy award. The story, "Frontiers" was originally published in Cimarron Review and was selected by Best American Short Stories as a "Distinguished Story of 2016." Buzzfeed named it one of the Books Queer Women (And Everybody Else) Should Read. Caspers’ other books of fiction include Heavier Than Air (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), awarded the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction and listed as a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, and Little Book of Days (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009). In 2013 she co-edited with Joell Hallowell a book of oral histories, Lawfully Wedded Wives: Rethinking Marriage in the 21st Century.
Her work has been supported by a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant, Barbara Deming Memorial Grant and Award, a LAMBDA Literary Award nomination, and the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award. Stories have appeared in numerous literary reviews, including Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, Cimmaron Review, Black Warrior, Ontario Review, and The Sun. She is a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University and lives in San Francisco.
