Amy Hempel established her reputation in the vanguard of American short story writers with the
publication of her first book of short stories, Reasons to Live (Knopf, 1985).This book, along with her three
succeeding collections, At The Gates of The Animal Kingdom (Knopf ,1990), Tumble Home (Scribner, 1997) and The Dog of the Marriage (Scribner, 2005) were gathered in a single volume, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (Scribner, 2006). It was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, was a finalist
for the PEN/Faulkner Award, won an award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in
addition was singled out by Newsweek, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle and Time Out New York.
Amy Hempel has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an inaugural fellowship from The United States
Artists Foundation as well as the Mary Frances Hobson Medal and a Silver Medal from the Commonwealth
Club of California. Her stories have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart
Prize, among others. She is currently Director of the Graduate Writing Program at Brooklyn College.
Previous winners of the Rea Award for the Short Story are:
| Cynthia Ozick (1986) |
Gina Berriault (1997) |
| Robert Coover (1987) |
John Edgar Wideman (1998) |
| Donald Barthelme (1988) |
Joy Williams (1999) |
| Tobias Wolff (1989) |
Deborah Eisenberg (2000) |
| Joyce Carol Oates (1990) |
Alice Munro (2001) |
| Paul Bowles (1991) |
Mavis Gallant (2002) |
| Eudora Welty (1992) |
Antonya Nelson (2003) |
| Grace Paley (1993) |
Lorrie Moore (2004) |
| Tillie Olsen (1994) |
Ann Beattie (2005) |
| Richard Ford (1995) |
John Updike (2006) |
| Andre Dubus (1996) |
StuartDybek (2007) |
In addition to the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Dungannon Foundation also sponsors the Rea Visiting Writers and Rea Visiting Lecturers programs at the University of Virginia and Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story at Symphony Space in New York City. |
