Mark Mayer

Mark Mayer is the award-winning author of the debut story collection Aerialists. In her praise of the collection, Marilyn Robinson wrote, “Mayer writes with a luminous, wistful, elegance.” For Carmen Maria Machado Aerialist was “one of the best collections I’ve read in years.” And Emily Ruskovich called Mayer “a magician of the American sentence.”

Mayer's new story collection, About, Above, Around: 50 Prepositions, is the winner of the George Garrett Fiction Prize, judged by Kaveh Akbar, who calls it “thrillingly ambitious and deliciously readable, a remarkable vortex of place and mind and spirit illuminating how our lives are shaped, and how we're held within them. Mayer has given us one of the most dextrous, impressive books I've read in ages.

Mayer holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD from the University of Denver, and he was awarded the Dana Emerging Writer residency at Cornell’s Center for the Literary Arts. His stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Kenyon Review, Guernica, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, and The Best American Mystery Stories. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Memphis.

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