Changes

These stories are enveloped by change and the changes that shift the trajectories of our lives: change that shatters us, change that opens the world, and change from which we can never come back. These fourteen stories tell us about extensive and inevitable changes and how we realign ourselves and our lives, if we can.

Ethan Laughman is a recruitment, marketing, and communications specialist at the University of Georgia's College of Environment and Design. Among the few who have read every Flannery O'Connor Award-winning volume, he has collaborated closely with the series' authors in compiling these new anthologies. Catherine Brady is the author of Curled in the Bed of Love, which won the 2011 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her story collection The End of the Class War was a Book Sense 76 selection, and The Mechanics of Falling received the Northern California Book Award for Fiction. Her nonfiction works include Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction and Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres. She has taught in the MFA in Writing program at the University of San Francisco. Her stories have appeared in such publications as The Cimarron Review, Other Voices, The Missouri Review, The Kenyon Review, and Best American Short Stories 2004. Philip F. Deaver is the author of Silent Retreats, which received the 1987 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Bread Loaf. His short fiction has appeared in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards 1988 and has been recognized in Best American Short Stories 1995 and The Pushcart Prize XX. Deaver taught in the English Department at Rollins College and was permanent writer in residence there. He was also on the fiction faculty in the Spalding University brief residency MFA program. Greg Downs has been the least successful high school varsity basketball coach in Tennessee, the editor of a muckraking weekly newspaper on Chicago's South Side, a karaoke performer profiled in the Boston Phoenix, and a reporter on the tail of a fugitive cult leader. A graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he is an assistant professor of history at the City College of New York. Downs's stories have appeared in such publications as Glimmer Train, Meridian, Chicago Reader, and Sycamore Review. Amina Gautier is the author of At-Risk, which won the 2011 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. She is the author of two more award-winning short story collections, Now We Will Be Happy and The Loss of All Lost Things. She was the 2018 recipient of the Pen/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Her work has appeared in the anthologies Best African American Fiction and New Stories from the South and in numerous literary journals including AGNI, Boston Review, Glimmer Train, Oxford American, and Southern Review. Jacquelin Gorman is the author of The Seeing Glass, a memoir. She grew up in a family of physicians in the shadow of Johns Hopkins Hospital and spent a great deal of time in Maryland's hospitals as a girl. She has practiced as a health-care lawyer in Los Angeles and as a hospital chaplain, and she is currently the program director at the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Her stories have appeared in Slake Magazine, Kenyon Review, ScreamOn