MBF / DE GROOT Prize Winners

Branden Boyer-White’s fiction has appeared in Hunger Mountain, Alaska Quarterly Review, Third Coast, and Anthropoid, among other places. Born and raised in the California desert, she currently works as a freelance writer and drinks too much coffee in Los Angeles. Her novella, Dice, was selected as a 2018 runner-up in the Miami Book Fair/de Groot Literary award.

Dennis Johnson is the co-founder and CEO of Melville House, an independent publisher located in Brooklyn, New York. A former journalist, he is also the founder of MobyLives  one of the world’s first and most well-known book blogs, based upon his syndicated newspaper column about books (the original MobyLives).  

Jim Shepard is the author of seven novels, including most recently The Book of Aron, five story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway―a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize―and editor of the anthology Writers at the Movies. He is also the author of The Tunnel at the End of the Light: Essays on Movies and Politics, which argues that some of our most persistent and destructive assumptions, might come from the movies. In these ten essays Jim Shepard weaves close readings of film with cultural criticism to explore the ways in which movies work so ubiquitously to reflect how Americans think and act. Shepard’s latest story collection, The World to Come(Knopf) spans borders and centuries with deceptive ease. From English Arctic explorers in one of history's most nightmarish expeditions to eighteenth-century French balloonists inventing manned flight, Shepard makes each of these wildly various worlds his own. Of Shepard, The Daily Beast writes, "Without a doubt the most ambitious story writer in America."

Marci Vogel is an award-winning writer, translator and poet. Death & Other Holidays (Melville House) is her fiction debut, and won the inaugural Miami Book Fair / de Groot Prize for fiction. The 2017 Miami Book Fair/de Groot Prize winner, this debut novella introduces a distinctive new American voice. Funny, tender, and wholly original, Death & Other Holidays is a year in the life of a young woman coming to terms with the death of her beloved stepfather, while attempting to find love in LA. We are introduced to her friends and family, as she struggles to launch herself out into the world, to take the risks of love — the one constancy in all the change. Told with a great good humor and underlying affection for all her characters, Death and Other Holidays announces a brilliant and assured new voice in American fiction.

Niki Tulk is an Australian writer, cellist and theater-maker based in the US, currently a PhD student in Theater and Devaney Fellow at the University of Colorado Boulder. Niki received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from The New School, New York City, and for three years taught writing to undergraduate artists at Parsons The New School for Design. She has published poetry, fiction, dramatic and literary criticism in Emergency Index, The Saranac Review Tenth Anniversary Edition, Rock River Review, The Sheepshead Review, and others. She is runner up of the inaugural 2018 Miami Book Fair/de Groot Prize for the Novella, awarded to exceptional fiction of 17,500-40,000 words.

Valerie Merians is the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House. She will be part of the presentation of the inaugural 2018 Miami Book Fair/de Groot Prize for the Novella, awarded to exceptional fiction of 17,500-40,000 words.