Gina Berriault Award Reading ft. Suzanne Rivecca

Join us in celebrating the winner of the 2016 Gina Berriault Award: Suzanne Rivecca. Rivecca’s short story collection, Death is Not an Option (W.W. Norton & Company 2010), has been lauded by the San Francisco Chronicle as “ferociously intelligent.”

The Gina Berriault Award was inaugurated by Peter Orner in conjunction with Fourteen Hills Press to pay homage to the eponymous writer, a former SFSU professor who with every story embodied a certain selflessness and unflinching compassion. The award is given annually to a writer with a similar spirit who has shown a love for storytelling and a commitment to helping young writers.

Suzanne Rivecca was raised in West Michigan. Her first book, Death is Not an Option, was a finalist for The Story Prize, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. NPR said of the collection that: “[Rivecca’s] talent allows her to impressively flex the muscle of fiction, making us keep our attention where it belongs—on these bracing stories promising a fine career.” Rivecca is the recipient of the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and writing fellowships from Stanford University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her short stories have received two Pushcart Prizes and inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2013.