Literary Fiction
Literary Fiction writers from Minnesota.

Nigar Alam
Born in Karachi, Pakistan, Nigar Alam spent her childhood in Turkey, Nigeria, Italy, Kenya, Indonesia, and the United States before returning to Karachi. With an MBA and CPA, she has worked in both brand management and auditing. Currently, Alam teaches at Anoka-Ramsey Community College and lives with her family in Minnesota.

Judith F. Brenner
Judith F. Brenner is an author and editor. Her debut novel, The Moments Between Dreams, won four awards, including the 2022 National Indie Excellence Award and 2023 IBPA’s Benjamin Franklin Fiction Silver Award. She’s a short story contributor to Minnesota Stories anthology. Brenner is the managing editor and publisher of Sharpeners Report. She instructs writing…

Teresa Wilhelm Waldof
Teresa Waldof is the world’s leading expert on the Ames Project section of the Manhattan Project. Her book, Wilhelm’s Way: The Inspiring Story of the Iowa Chemist Who Saved the Manhattan Project, was winner of the 2023 Minnesota Book Award for General Nonfiction. An expert in building collaborative, high-performance teams, Waldof is a dynamic speaker…

Alan Davis
Alan Davis’s So Bravely Vegetative won The Prize Americana for Fiction; Alone with the Owl and Rumors from the Lost World both won the Many Voices Project Competition. He co-edited Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Bob Dylan and 10 editions of American Fiction, received a Loft-McKnight Award of Distinction, a…

Antonia Angress
Antonia Angress was born in Los Angeles and raised in San José, Costa Rica. She is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Minnesota MFA program, where she was a Winifred Fiction Fellow and a College of Liberal Arts Fellow. She lives in Minneapolis. Sirens & Muses is her first novel.

Kurt Johnson
Kurt Johnson, along with his daughter Ellie, wrote The Barrens, winner of the 2023 Minnesota Book Award for Novel and Short Story and a 2022 Great Group Reads selection. Johnson divides his time between Minneapolis and Ely, Minnesota.

Loren Niemi
Loren Niemi is a author/poet and professional storyteller whose life work has been creating, collecting, performing, teaching, and writing about what it means to be human. His collection of non-traditional “ghost” stories, What Haunts Us, won the 2020 Midwest Book Award for Sci-Fi/Horror/Fantasy/Paranormal fiction. His most recent book, A Breviary for the Lost, is a…

Darci Schummer
Darci Schummer hails from the village of Fall Creek, Wisconsin. Primarily a fiction writer, she is the author of the story collection Six Months in the Midwest, co-author of the poetry/prose collaboration Hinge, and author of the novel The Ballad of Two Sisters. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Ninth Letter, Folio, Jet…

Michael MacBride
Originally from Michigan, Michael MacBride now calls Minnesota home. He has delivered newspapers, worked for UPS, delivered pizzas, done collections at a bank, was a roadie for a country band, and was a grant-writer and funder-researcher for non-profits. He also taught English, Literature, and Humanities courses at universities and colleges in Minnesota, New Hampshire, Ohio,…

William Durbin
William Durbin lives on Lake Vermilion at the edge of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Wilderness. A winner of the Great Lakes Book Award and a two-time winner of the Minnesota Book Award, he has published 14 novels for young readers, including, The Broken Blade, Wintering, Blackwater Ben, Song of Sampo Lake, The Darkest Evening, Dead Man’s…