Dzanc Books announced yesterday that a manuscript by Luis Jaramillo has won the press’ 2009 short story collection contest.
Jaramillo (pictured, via) is the associate chair of the writing program at The New School. His forthcoming collection, The Doctor’s Wife, began with a story that he published in Tin House in 2008, and evolved into a series of stories set over fifty years in a lakeside community in Washington State.
Dzanc Books, a non-profit publisher of literary fiction, selected Jaramillo’s collection from more than 100 submissions.
We got in touch with the winning author to find out what’s next. “I’m working on a novel set in the mid-eighties during the birth of the bagged lettuce industry in the Salinas Valley,” Jaramillo told GalleyCat yesterday. “It’s like a big nineteenth century novel in that people from all classes — farm workers, growers, lawyers for the workers and the agribusinesses, teachers — fall in love, have sex, and try to screw each other over.”
Sounds epic. In the meantime, The Doctor’s Wife will be published by Dzanc Books in October 2012.