Bennett Sims (author)

Sims was born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.^[1][2] During high school, he spent three summers at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts' boarding program, where he wrote fiction.^[3] In 2008, he graduated from Pomona College, where he was mentored by David Foster Wallace.^[3] He later graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow,^[4] and he served as a Provost's Postgraduate Visiting Writer at the University of Iowa in 2012-2013.^[5]

Sims's debut novel, A Questionable Shape, was published by Two Dollar Radio on May 1, 2013.^[6] It won the 2014 Bard Fiction Prize, which included $30,000 and a semester-long writer-in-residence appointment at Bard College.^[7]

Many reviews called the book a novel with zombies that is not a zombie novel.^[8][9][10] It is set in Louisiana and opaquely references the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.^[11][12] It received generally favorable reviews from media outlets, including The Guardian,^[9] Electric Literature,^[13] the Los Angeles Review of Books,^[12] and Publishers Weekly.^[14]

In 2017, Sims published his second book, the short story collection White Dialogues, with Two Dollar Radio.^[15] It received favorable reviews from Publishers Weekly,^[16] Kirkus Reviews,^[17] and Bookforum.^[18] Sims was a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 2018-2019, where he worked on another novel.^[19]

Sims's stories have been published in The Iowa Review,^[20] Story,^[21] Conjunctions,^[22] Ploughshares,^[23] and the Pushcart Prize Anthology.^[24]

Other Minds and Other Stories was a finalist for The Story Prize.^[25]

Sims teaches undergraduate fiction courses at the University of Iowa.^[26]