The University of Iowa Press is pleased to announce the winners of the 2014 Iowa Short Fiction Awards. Heather A. Slomski is the winner of the 2014 Iowa Short Fiction Award for her collection The Lovers Set Down Their Spoons. Kathleen Founds's When Mystical Creatures Attack! is the winner of the 2014 John Simmons Short Fiction Award. The recipients were selected by Wells Tower, author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. The University of Iowa Press will publish both collections in the fall of 2014.
About the Authors
After earning her MFA from Western Michigan University, Heather A. Slomski held the Axton Fellowship in Fiction at the University of Louisville. Her work has appeared in TriQuarterly, American Letters & Commentary, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, The Normal School, and elsewhere. A recipient of a Minnesota State Artist Initiative Grant and a Minnesota Emerging Writers' Grant, she currently teaches writing at Concordia College and lives in Moorhead, Minnesota, with her husband, son, and dog.
Kathleen Founds has worked at a nursing home, a phone bank, a South Texas middle school, and a midwestern technical college specializing in truck driving certificates. She got her undergraduate degree at Stanford and her MFA at Syracuse. She teaches social-justice themed English classes at Cabrillo College in Watsonville, California, and writes while her toddler is napping. Her fiction has been published in The Sun, Epiphany, Booth Journal, The MacGuffin, and Stanford Alumni Magazine. 
