Kathy Fish
Kathy Fish is a core faculty member for the Mile-High MFA program at Regis University in Denver. Additionally, she teaches two-week intensive Fast Flash© Workshops online. Her fifth collection of flash fiction, "Wild Life: Collected Works from 2003-2018" released in late 2018 from Matter Press. Fish's "Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild," which addresses the scourge of gun violence and mass shootings in America, has been widely read, studied, and shared. It was chosen by Sheila Heti for Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018 and by Aimee Bender for Best Small Fictions 2018. The piece will also appear in a forthcoming edition of The Norton Reader.
Fish's flash fiction was also selected by Stuart Dybek for inclusion in Best Small Fictions 2016 and Amy Hempel for Best Small Fictions 2017. Two other stories were selected for the W.W. Norton anthology, New Micro. Additionally, several of her stories have been selected for the Wigleaf Top 50. She has also had stories chosen for the first short story vending machines in the U.S. at Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Cafe in San Francisco.
Kathy Fish's stories have been published or are forthcoming in The Lineup: 20 Provocative Women Writers (Black Lawrence Press, 2015, Richard Thomas (ed.), Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up to No Good (Upperrubberboot Press, 2015) Slice, Guernica, Indiana Review, Mississippi Review online, Denver Quarterly, New South, Quick Fiction, and various other journals and anthologies. She was the guest editor of Dzanc Books' "Best of the Web 2010." She is the author of four other collections of short fiction: a chapbook of flash fiction in the chapbook collective, "A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: Four Chapbooks of Short Short Fiction by Four Women" (Rose Metal Press, 2008), "Wild Life" (Matter Press, 2011) and "Together We Can Bury It" (The Lit Pub 2012) and "Rift," co-authored with Robert Vaughan (Unknown Press, 2016). She has been a fiction editor for Smokelong Quarterly and judged a number of flash fiction contests. She has taught flash fiction to high school students at American University's Discover the World of Communication summer program.
“The beautiful unruliness of literature is what makes it so much fun to wander through: you read Jane Austen and you say, oh, that is IT. And then you turn around and read Sterne, and you say, Man, that is IT. And then you wander across a century or so, and you run into Kafka, or Calvino, or Cortazar, and you say, well that is IT. And then you stroll through what Updike called the grottos of Ulysses, and after that you consort with Baldwin or Welty or Spencer, or Morrison, or Bellow or Fitzgerald and then back to W. Shakespeare, Esq; the champ, and all the time you feel the excitement of being in the presence of IT. And when you yourself spend the good time writing, you are not different in kind than any of these people, you are part of that miracle of human invention. So get to work. Get on with IT, no matter how difficult IT is. Every single gesture, every single stumble, every single uninspired-feeling hour, is worth IT." Richard Bausch”